by Gabrielle Mattingly
The Vanishing Louisville’s
A small orchestra's enterprising recording series has brought it fame. foundation grants, and applause from specialized record collectors but protests from the folks’ at home.
IN 1954, LOUISVILLE Mayor Charles P. Farnsley predicted that in future years the Louisville Orchestra's First Edition Records would be "much sought-after collector's items" and "their value will zoom." Twenty years later this is true, but by default, Farnsley wasn't actually right or wrong, but his naive optimism was misplaced.
The formidable Louisville catalogue, although listed in its entirety in Schwann, remains as much of an enigma to most music lovers and record collectors as it did in 1954. The contemporary music offered on the Louisville label not only has continued to turn off discophiles, but also has discouraged record dealers. Few and far between are stores brave enough to stock these recordings.
Still, the earlier Louisvilles are disappearing, and their prices are starting to zoom. Some rare-record dealers are asking as much as $50 a disc for some out-of-print items, like Roger Sessions' Idyll of Theocritus (LOU 574) and Ernst Krenek's Eleven Transparencies (LOU 563). The rarest of all is LOU 545-8, which contains Luigi Dallapiccola's Variazioni Per Orchestra as well as shorter works by Pablo Moncayo, Ulysses Kay, and Darius Milhaud. A San Francisco dealer is offering taped dubbings of this record for twice its original retail price.
The idea of the Louisville recording project came from Mayor Farnsley when he was elected president of the Philharmonic Society in 1948. Noting that the orchestra was broke and always had been, he decided to stop engaging expensive soloists and to use that part of the budget to commission com posers of world renown to write especially for the Louisville Orchestra. He also proposed a limit of fifty players to save money and facilitate touring, broadcasting, and, recording.
To the young conductor, Robert Whitney, Farnsley's words were a vision to be shaped into reality.
Himself a skillful composer, Whitney knew the idea would be heartily welcomed by composers, Former violinist Gabrielle Mattingly is working on a book on the Louisville story, but he couldn't foresee the dogged resistance it would meet in its collision course with conservative local audiences and critics.
From the very beginning, the commissioning series was both history-making and hall-emptying.
For the 1948-49 season, Milhaud, Virgil Thomson, Roy Harris, Joaquin Rodrigo, and Gian Francesco Malipiero wrote works for the orchestra. For 1949 50, Paul Hindemith, William Schuman, David Diamond, Robert Russell Bennett, and Claude Almand were commissioned to furnish premieres, but Louisville wasn't impressed. (In later years Whitney scheduled the contemporary pieces early in the evening so concertgoers could use that time in the more pleasant pursuit of downing a stiff drink in their parked cars before facing the music.) Listening to the recordings of works created for the 1948 to 1950 seasons, it's difficult to understand what the audiences and critics found so repulsive.
A typical example is Harris' Kentucky Spring (LOU 602), which had its premiere in 1949--a pleasant, tuneful work cut from the same musical fabric as Copland's Appalachian Spring. As current Music Director Jorge Mester points out, however, here was an audience unfamiliar not only with the landmarks of contemporary music, but with Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony.
Although the commissions attracted inter national attention, not all of the Philharmonic Society's directors shared Farnsley's enthusiasm for the project, and they were becoming increasingly sensitive to vitriolic critical blasts in the usually reserved Louisville Courier Journal and to the near-desertion of the concert hall. During Christmas week of 1949, then, Whitney was informed that, after two early January programs, the remainder of the season would be canceled and that the orchestra would be disbanded.
Obviously the threat was never carried out. Those two "last" programs featured Martha Graham dancing Schuman's Judith ballet. For once, Columbia Auditorium was sold out for a Louisville 1937. "They finally got to me. just the way they're starting to get to Mester now." he said in reference to some barbarous personal attacks on Jorge Mester that have appeared in the local papers recently.
And what is the catalyst of these personal recriminations? "Why, the new music and the continuing recording series, of course," says Whitney.
In sharp contrast to Whitney, who made Kentucky his permanent home, the orchestra's new conductor, a young Mexican-born American. has remained a jet-age commuter, first from New York, where he was conducting opera, and then from Kansas City and Aspen, where he holds simultaneous music directorships. Naturally this gives Mester much greater independence than Whitney had and blunts the continuing critical attacks.
"They're trying to drive me out," he says of the Louisville newspaper critics. "but their effect is negligible on me. If a critic is upset with me in Louisville, it's too bad he's stuck there." Mester, recognizing from the beginning that the local audience and the recording audience were two discrete entities, manages to budget his rehearsal time so that not every work to be recorded has to be played in concert. Still, economics doesn't always permit this luxury. "When I have to strike a compromise between the concerts and the recordings," he says, "the critics get upset because it's not what they think an audience wants to hear, and the record collectors aren't happy because they're not getting the ultimate rage of the week." Considering this dilemma, why did Mester take on the added difficulty of the Romantic revival? One might surmise the audience of Max Bruch's Second Symphony (LS 703) would not be the same audience that would buy a recording of George Crumb's Echoes of Time and the River (LS 711). Yet both Louisvilles share the uncommon distinction of being instant sellouts.
Since coming to the city in 1968, Mester has continued Whitney's six-discs-a-year pace, recording eighty-five works by seventy-three composers, in most cases personally supervised by the composer.
The choice of what to record is strictly the conductor's. Not surprisingly, record subscribers send in their own requests. (The most frequently requested is Havergal Brian, with Fartein Valen second!) Scott usually arrives in Louisville a day before the recording date to study the scores. If he's lucky, the works will have already been performed in con cert and there will be a WAVE radio broadcast tape for him to listen to. Otherwise he has to sight-read the score, approximating timings and guessing at difficult-to-record passages. These sessions appear at first glance to be anarchic, makeshift affairs, but actually they're efficient and suited to the purpose at hand-to record a union orchestra at the lowest possible cost. Scott sets up fast, utilizing from nine to twelve AKG Telefunken microphones. His "recording booth" is Mester's dressing room, back stage at the Macauley Theatre. the orchestra's new home. The local recording company that replaced Columbia in 1970 has temporarily installed a couple of Ampex four-track tape recorders, a DBX noise suppressor, and an RCA mixing console and speakers. High-output 3M tape is used.
With only three hours to record a minimum of one and a half record sides of difficult, unfamiliar music, Mester and his orchestra have to tape 65 minutes of playing in the time it takes the Philadelphia Orchestra to tape 12 minutes. For each of the ten subscription concerts he conducts, Mester gets four full orchestra rehearsals of two and a half hours each, plus two separate rehearsals for strings.
The base salary of a Louisville player per service is $22 for rehearsals and performances and $95 for a recording session. This doesn't add up to a living wage, and players hold other jobs to support them selves. The highest paid player, Concertmaster Paul Kling, earns only $5,000 a year. He and his wife, harpist Taka Kling, teach to increase their in comes. But if it weren't for the recording series, the able manager James D. Hicks (who previously held a similar post in Detroit), Mester, Kling, and the best orchestral players wouldn't be in Louisville.
All of them admit this openly.
Interestingly, the orchestra's national eminence, created by the commissions and recordings, is exploited by local industry in recruiting college-trained technicians. And while I was in the orchestra's business office, a woman stopped over on a Mexico to New York flight just to buy her son some Louisville records he'd heard on the University of Mexico radio station. No one seemed surprised at this, because it isn't unusual.
The Philharmonic Society has never felt the need to replenish depleted stocks unless a record sells out immediately. What usually happens is that the most active issues languish for years in Schwann-2, then one day just disappear without even a black diamond epitaph to mark their passing. In the case of early stereo releases also issued in mono, even Schwann doesn't know for sure when only mono remains.
The entire Whitney-conducted catalogue is thinning out noticeably, as are the operas con ducted by Moritz Bomhard. The Philharmonic Society hasn't officially stated that it won't reissue out-of-print items, but no one who has anything to do with the recording series expects reissues.
To collectors of twentieth-century music who don't already own all of the Louisvilles they want, by far the best way to do this is to become a sub scriber for $28.50 a year and exercise the option to purchase any record older than the last ten issues at budget-label prices. As for finding those Louisvilles that are out of print, good luck. It took this writer five years to get a complete collection.
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(High Fidelity, Apr. 1975)
Also see:
The Complete Nielsen Symphonies (review, HF mag Apr. 1975)
Letters to the Editor (HF mag. Apr. 1975)