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By JAMES GOODFRIEND, Music Editor
SLEEPING BEAUTIES
WHEN one literally lives among new record releases, as a music editor or a record reviewer must usually do, the attraction of old records, old favorites, becomes well nigh overpowering. Sometimes, to be sure, one wants to get away from music entirely, or at least from recorded music. But there are many occasions when one wishes simply to hear a record that has given pleasure many times in the past--and can be counted on to do so again--rather than critically sample the latest recorded efforts of the latest performers. When such an urge strikes, I can spend a whole evening, usually with like-minded friends, listening only to 78's (I still have about two thousand of them), but I am constantly amazed at just how many of my favorite discs are LP's, and even more amazed to find just how many of them are still available.
Records that have been in the catalog for some years usually don't sell very well; sales tend to start out with a bang when a disc is first released and then drop as fast as the value of a Chevy when it passes from new to used. Thereafter records sell steadily but usually lightly, most of them flirting with the line of economic unfeasibility until they finally go out of print. Some get reissued periodically not that they were ever really unavailable, but a new cover and a new number put them, however fleetingly, into the category of new releases once again, and sales revive accordingly. But some stay around in their first or second incarnation for many years, sleeping beauties in the catalog waiting for the right man to come around, buss them, and say, "Where have you been all my life?" A lot of my old favorites are in that category.
Such a record is the Counterpoint disc (5519E, electronically rechanneled for stereo) of John Blow's Ode on the Death of Mr. Henry Purcell, originally released on the Esoteric label twenty or so years ago. The ode is a set ting of words by John Dryden for two countertenors, two recorders, and continuo, and it is a stunningly beautiful work, quite worthy of its great subject. It is sung, in this recording, by Russell Oberlin and Charles Bressler, extraordinary singers and musicians both. Oberlin is no longer active as a singer, but he was at the time the possessor of a thoroughly ma ture alto voice, the like of which hadn't been heard in New York perhaps for centuries.
One really had to hear it to believe it, and even now, when the art of the countertenor has enjoyed a real revival, Oberlin's voice, as heard on records, is still a striking instrument.
The combination of those voices and that music is just too much to resist.
A number of records were issued on the Bartok label (owned and operated by the recording engineer Peter Bartok, the composer's son) during the Fifties, and, while sometimes difficult to find, they have been continuously available since. Bartok recordings were always superbly engineered; though all of them (if memory serves) were mono, there is probably not one that does not still sound good today. A great deal of the repertoire first recorded by Bart6k has been done elsewhere at least equally well since, but one pair of records--Bartok 904 and 914, Hungarian folk songs, in arrangements by both Bartok and Kodaly, sung by Leslie Chabay--have not found worthy successors. These are records that require close attention, for the music is not only beautiful, it is "real" in a very special way: one hears the work of art, but one also hears through it to the life of the folk who created the original song. Chabay's renditions catch both the high-art and the folk quality, and Tibor Kozma's piano accompaniments are splendid. Not party music, but an experience.
Also folk-flavored, but otherwise totally different music, are the two Suites for Band by Gustav Hoist, recorded by Mercury and currently available on imported pressings in the Mercury Golden Import series (75011 E).
No one who has not heard this music can possibly be aware of just how appealing it is.
Hoist had a flair for band writing probably unmatched among serious composers, and what one hears on this record is not the sound of an orchestra crippled by the loss of strings, but an entirely different sort of ensemble, with a great variety of colors and enormous dynamic range. The music itself, whether folk-song-based (Suite No. 2) or of original inspiration (No. 1), reflects a very intriguing musical personality still too little known today. At tractive works by Grainger and Vaughan Williams fill out the disc. The performances by the Eastman Ensemble have not been bettered since by anyone, and are not likely to be.
A Columbia record, currently in the catalog as Odyssey 32160351, contains the late Jean Morel's delightful performance of the Offenbach-Rosenthal suite from La Vie Parisienne, but it also contains four arias from Offenbach's La Perichole sung by Jennie Tourel. If you want to hear what French operetta is really all about, you must hear those arias. Tourel's performances have not since been equaled; her voice was at its very best then (the recordings are from 78's), her sense of style-when to be coy and when to be broad was magnificent. The whole is a splendid example of light music as high art.
All the foregoing records are to be found in Schwann-2, since all are originally mono recordings. A disc to be found in Schwann-1, early stereo though it may be, is the Handel Concerto for Harp and Lute, Op. 4, No. 6, as reconstructed by Thurston Dart, on L'Oiseau-Lyre 60013. Though Dart made an extremely good musicological case for the rightness of the harp and lute combination in this concerto, this is the only recording ever made of the work in that form (others are for harp alone, organ, or recorder). Certainly, it is one of the classic records of the LP era, a very popular disc in its time, but perhaps unknown to many of the newer generations of record collectors. The music is as charming as any thing Handel ever wrote, and the sheer sounds of the two plucked instruments, together with the transparency of the orchestral strings, combine to produce as clear a musical analog to fine champagne as has ever been recorded.
FINALLY (for this column) I would like to call attention to an ancient recording of Hein rich Schiitz's St. John Passion, originally on the Renaissance label (test your memory of that) and currently on Dover 5243. I have heard other recordings of this and the companion Schutz Passions since, but I have never heard one with the sheer affect of this one. Here we have, through the simplest of means (solo singers and unaccompanied chorus together with mono recording), that old, unbeatable combination: great music and great performance. The record merely waits for someone to hear it to be forever cherished.
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