Edward Tatnall Canby
Tchaikovsky: Serenade in C for Strings, Op. 48. Prokofiev: "Classical" Symphony. Arensky: Variations on a Theme by Tchaikovsky, Op. 35a. English Chamber Orchestra, Somary. Vanguard Cardinal VCS 10099, stereo, $ 2.98.
More string music--the "Classical" Symphony is mainly a string-y piece in keeping with its classical intent--played here by a rather full sounding body appropriate to the music. The sounds are all ultra familiar but, even so, furnish a pleasant tonal contrast to the usual heavier works of the type for full orchestra. In our day of winds, percussion and electronics, the smooth eloquence of a string ensemble is increasingly special for the ear-how long can we maintain it? How long can the difficult art of string playing (and violin building and maintenance) be sustained? Is there anything sourer than inadequate string playing? The time may come when that is what we'll begin to hear.
Not on this disc. The English Chamber Orchestra rates at the top, Johannes Somary, the conductor, seems to be taking a vacation from Handel in this recording. Though the orchestra itself is beyond fault, there is for my ear a very slight stiffness to the conducting of the Tchaikovsky which is noticeable after the plastic, fluent conducting on the similar Telefunken recording of early Mendelssohn string symphonies. Just possibly, Somary is too much into Handel to adapt to these plastic, fluent string pieces. Not bad, and for some listeners the relative restraint may prove a delight. Somary moves more easily in the Arensky, and in the Prokofiev, notably the last two movements.
The exaggerated price difference between this Vanguard Cardinal disc and a corresponding Philips release, the Rossini Sonatas for Strings, points up the arbitrary quality of our current disc prices, unbalanced out of all reason.
$2.98 list for the Vanguard disc, $6.98 for Philips! An unhealthy thing, and it does nothing to bolster the classical buyer's faith in the soundness of the classical business.
Performance: B; Sound: B+
Scott Joplin. Ragtime on the Harpsichord. Vol. 2 Wm. Neil Roberts. Klavier KS 516, stereo, $ 5.98.
So we come a full circle! Back right after the war. I acquired a snazzy little album of 10-inch 78 rpm shellac discs played by Sylvia Marlowe, now one of the leading harpsichordists of the older generation. It was boogie-woogie on the harpsichord. Not exactly inspired--she seems to have memorized all the boogies (Pine Top's Boogie) note for note and simply played them off on the instrument; whereas the original musicians made 'em up as they went along. But it was a novel and interesting idea, even so, and I kept the records long after (I suspect) Miss Marlowe disowned them. She'll probably blush if she reads this.
The present Scott Joplin craze--it is nothing less--has brought us everything from Scott Joplin on the Monster Steinway in the Style of Chopin (my title) to the present LP and its forerunner, aptly called "Great Scott!", transferring the gentle Joplin music to a most improbable instrument, one that surely was unknown to him. But the rags did occasionally sound much like a harpsichord when played on the tinny pianos which was their normal and proper medium. If you ask me, I'd rather hear Joplin any day on the harpsichord, as here, than in the lush, hot-house grand-piano stylings now current in other recordings.
Performances: B, Sound: B
Heavy Organ at Carnegie Hall. Virgil Fox, with Revelation Lights! Plus an Extra-Special Surprise! RCA Quadra disc ARD1 0081 $5.98.
Here the conscientious reviewer (and who isn't that?) is faced with, say, a tri-lemma, or maybe quadri. Virgil Fox, once, if I am right, the popular organist of the Riverside Church in New York, has suddenly grown longish hair, taken on light shows, and made himself the hit of the youngest generation, whole Carnegie Hallsful of them, shouting and cheering. What are we to say? Especially when (a) we cannot see the light show, only hear the music, plain and simple, and yet (b) must listen to Mr. Fox's remarks to his youthful audience, which come-to wild cheers and yells-between every number?? Well, I'll put it this way. If I were to do a bit of tape editing so that this recording was simply that of an organist playing various well known Bach items, including non-organ music, transcribed, (and including Adeste Fidelis, O Come All Ye Faithful, which I would edit out, for the non-Xmas season), we would have a "classical" Bach disc.
Judged as such, I would rate it around D-. Dreadful. Bach on a big old antediluvian organ (whatever it is they have in Carnegie Hall), played unregenerately with swell stops and monster bellowings, at break-neck speed, an absolute minimum of any sort of phrasing and melodic shape, in the manner of a 1920s theatre organist playing classic. (But without any of the exotic organ sound colors of the genuine theatre organ!) Just hack work, high-intensity. Sorry, but that is what this pair of ears says.
Well, better some Bach than none at all. Yes? I say no. I think that kids are easily and honestly misled down the musical primrose path. Maybe, maybe, OK. I suppose so. But my feeling is that what gets the kids is the show itself, Mr. Fox's coy comments between numbers, and the mere fact that a real CLASSICAL ORGANIST and a CLASSICAL COMPOSER are playing their own game with them.
Great! Yet in a way pathetic. So easy to mistake form for substance.
He could have played the Bach backwards and upside down for all the difference it would make.
The Fox comments? Concerning the Bach Toccata in F: "The word to-cahta means to touch. So if during this piece, while the rhythm is going, you wish to touch . . . the man next to you-I see no harm! Wild cheers and yells. Or: "Bach is like a jet stream. If you can get on it, you soar." Take them or leave them as you wish! Well, after all, the organ is a grand and glorious instrument and Bach is a ditto composer. Don't get me wrong--if this particular Bach seemed to me musically good, and/or new, or interestingly different, I'd be all for it in a moment. Instead, as music it seems to me pedestrian, reactionary, narrow, unperceptive, antiquated, in every respect exactly opposite to the supposed liberation of the show itself. That's what I can't take.
This, by the way, is Virgil Fox's third best selling album of heavy organ music. Heavy in the new sense of course. So I'd better shut up.
Performance: D, Sound: B
Robert Tear. Songs by Tchaikovsky. Philip Ledger, piano. Argo ZRG 707, stereo, $ 5.95.
If you have ever heard one of the late grand Russian operas--Boris Goudonov, for instance--sung by Russian singers (many recordings are available, particularly via the Melodiya-Angel label), you will know what Robert Tear is striving to achieve in these nominally small-scale songs, the late Russian version of the German Lied. He has a tremendous voice, a tremendous range of volume and of expression, and he is passionate beyond belief, singing with all the power of that highly singable language, Russian. These songs will knock you for a loop, as they used to say--and the big-handed pianist is just as energetic and as musical as Mr. Tear himself. This is no polite background music! You also may find yourself momentarily embarrassed, as by an overly passionate stage scene; for Mr. Tear's big voice gets so excited that in moments he is out of control. Pitch gives way, tone quality is strangled, disaster threatens. Yet somehow it is all part of the show and I suspect that those who were responsible for releasing a recording with "flaws" of this sort understood this very well. I'll go along, and say that it is a powerful and interesting record and Tchaikovsky was quite a song writer.
P.S. You'll spot one song immediately, the familiar. None--but the Lonely Heart, heard in a thousand mood music watered-down versions. The other 18 will almost surely be unfamiliar; they are not yet well known to singers.
Performance: A, Sound: B +
Schoenberg; Complete Songs for Voice and Piano, Vol. 2. Helen Vanni, Donald Gramm, Cornelis Opthof; Glenn Gould, Piano. Columbia M 31312, stereo, S 5.98.
Just in case you think . . . no! If you hadn't read the label, you might suppose some of these songs to be by Brahms, or Wolf or just maybe Richard Strauss; they are works in the great German song tradition, the Lied as it is usually called. Yet as you listen, it dawns on you that something is odd, a sort of vaguely seasick quality, (though not unpleasant), as though the decks of the great ship of music were beginning gently to heave, the solid foundation to move about. That is no less than Schoenberg leaving behind the old tradition of key, tonality, as it is called. Nothing new with him--Wagner had done a lot of it by midcentury. But the keylessness takes on a new quality in Schoenberg, an increasing instability, a growing chordlessness, in which his lifelong radicalism and originality is to be found.
Three good singers, all with traditional Lied voices, rich with vibrato as is proper but all three unerringly accurate as to pitch and ear-essential, to put it mildly, in such music. Thus the seasickness never grows unbalanced nor meaningless. Glenn Gould, as the man who sparked the original larger recorded series from which these songs are excerpted, is automatically excellent and authoritative at the piano.
The songs range from very early--just after the turn of the century--through as late as 1933. But the consistency of stylistic approach shows how strongly Schoenberg was out of German Romanticism.
Performances: A, Sound: B
Marie-Aimée Varro in Concert. (Liszt: Piano Concerto No. 1; Scarlatti, Schubert, Chopin, Debussy). Orion ORS 73112, mono, $ 5.98.
Marie-Aimée Varro (also spelled Warrot) died in 1971. She was clearly one of the great heroic women pianists out of the old tradition, who played Liszt and such with enormous strength and fire. I ran into her first recording, on Baroque, some years ago-it was absolutely astonishing in its power.
Like many a true old-style musician, Varro did not much like the idea of "canned music" (as James Petrillo used to call it) and only recorded in her last few years.
Since then, I have actually come to know her husband-entirely via the press, so to speak-a charming Frenchman who teaches in a small university in Canada. It was indeed a remarkable story he had to tell; for she had studied with Emil Sauer, who was an actual pupil of Liszt himself, and thus she acquired her piano styling, so to speak, almost direct from the source. As directly as our short human existence allows, in any case.
This was her last recording, made at a final concert, one side given over to the Concerto, the other to assorted solo pieces. Alas, the recording job was poorly managed and the sound is unpleasant, though not to the point of obscuring her musical message by any means. The Liszt Concerto is played as one might expect, with brilliance, verve and perfect style. (The Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra is the vehicle, which indicates the locale.) I found the solo works more problematical, simply for being so honest in a very old-fashioned style, straight out of the turn of the century. This indeed is the way pianists played then--everything in the same bravura fashion just as all older music was automatically "arranged" to suit the then modem orchestra. There was only one solid piano style in Liszt's and Sauer's day, and all types of music conformed as a matter of course. It was not a time for harpsichords and "old pianos"! The modem listener may thus find the Varro approach to Schubert, Chopin, even Debussy, somewhat strange. But never less than interesting. Try Mme. Varro's other records (with better sound), Baroque BC 2837 and BC 2849.
Performance: A, Sound: C-
(Audio magazine, Sept. 1973; Edward Tatnall Canby)
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