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Guns of Navarraise. Last month we reported RCA's plans to record Massenet's little-known La Navarraise in London this summer with Marilyn Horne, Placido Domingo, and Sherrill Milnes, Henry Lewis conducting the LSO. Well, the opera may not be little known for long. Edward Greenfield reports from London that CBS got off the first shot by recording that opera, in that city (at EMI No. 1 Studio), with that orchestra, last spring.
"Antonio de Almeida, fresh from troubled Lisbon," writes Greenfield, "conducted with passion. On the first day at least (when I attended), producer Paul Myers' main concern was whether all the soloists would arrive on time from late engagements all over Europe. Fortunately they did:
Lucia Popp as the heroine, Richard Cassilly as the hero, Gerard Souzay as his father, with Michel Senechal, Vicente Sardinero, and Claude Meloni making up the rest of the cast." The work, "obviously designed to cream off the Carmen public with its atmospheric Spanish dances and melodramatic story of the Carlist war of 1874," takes two acts, but it is so compact it will be easily contained on a single disc.
A pair of suits. Two items about legal squabbles caught our eye in the April 12 issue of Billboard. One we'd been aware of, the other was news to us, but we thought we'd pass the stories along to you for whatever benefit you might find in them.
RCA and Toscanini's heirs are suing the Arturo Toscanini Society to pre vent the latter from distributing any more of' the Maestro's recorded performances. Plaintiffs claim that RCA has exclusive, contractual rights. (The ATS's records are generally taken from broadcasts.) The Society, by the way, has been in business for years, primarily as a small mail-order distributor of material otherwise unavailable, and RCA had been treating it as a sleeping dog. During the past year, however, we had been noticing these records turning up in record stores, blatantly competing with RCA's own.
At that point, we suspect, RCA changed proverbs to cave canem! Also named in the suit were Everest Records, whose Olympic label has a set of Beethoven symphonies, and Vox, which has issued the Brahms symphonies and the Verdi Requiem under the Society's aegis. (Both Olympic's and Vox's sets came from the Society.) We remember the late Walter Toscanini in the mid-1960s waxing enthusiastically over the ATS's enthusiasm, but apparently he later signed a con tract giving RCA exclusive rights for five years to any noncommercial recordings of his father that he edited or otherwise "improved," generally for radio broadcasts. That contract, we understand, has expired. At any rate, in March Vox voluntarily with drew its Toscanini records for two weeks, and in April a restraining order put a damper on both Vox and Olympic until the matter is straightened out.
Muddying the waters still further is the fact that the Brahms set, emanating from 1949, is played by the New Philharmonia Orchestra. In 1949 the Philharmonia had an exclusive con tract with EMI! The other Billboard item noted that Peter Blair Noone was suing Anthony Green, Derek Leckenby, and Jan Barry Whitwam to prevent their using the appellation they jointly went under when all four were as friendly as 1965 Beatles. The three suees were the "Hermits." Peter Blair Noone was "Herman." In case you hadn't noticed. Bette Midler, pop record super-duper-star, hasn't had a recording out in nearly two years. Not that she hasn't been working in the studios, with producers Paul Simon of Columbia and Hal Davis of Motown, and she has a least planned some sessions with independent hit-maker Tony Sylvester.
But in each instance production was held up by some problem or other Midler's contract with Atlantic, for example. Currently in a smash one-woman Broadway show, she is hesitant to record it before she takes it on tour, insiders say, because she is afraid a recording will rob it of its "spontaneous surprises." Informal Israelis. The Israel Philharmonic has signed a new contract with Decca / London, the first fruits of which were what one observer called "the wackiest sessions in years." Zubin Mehta was in charge of the orchestra for recordings of Schubert's "Great" C major Symphony and Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra. While the Decca/London team has recorded the Israelis before, this time they were taken aback by the musicians' sub lime unawareness of time schedules.
Israel may be a socialist country, but there is no question of union restrictions inhibiting the orchestra. Recording breaks just happened when people thought they might. And as if to evoke a hoary local joke ("Put three Israelis together and you get four political parties"), each player voiced a different opinion as often as he could about how the music should go ("twenty players, twenty opinions," was one comment). At one point, Mehta asked, "Can I have a note?" He got fifty. But at the end everyone seemed happy. Decca's chief producer Ray Minshull is a very patient man.
Marching through the Bicentennial.
Nonesuch's long-standing interest in Americana has already produced such notable items as a disc of Stephen Foster songs, the various piano ragtime records, and Joan Morris' "After the Ball" collection with William Bolcom. So when Nonesuch director Tracey Sterne says she's onto some one whose name is going to become big, we listen.
The name in question is Henry Clay Work (1832-84), who doesn't even rate a mention in Grove's. But Baker's de scribes him as "a printer by trade; entirely self-taught in music; his first success was We are coming, Sister Mary. . . ." Among his other songs:
"Grandfather's Clock" and "Marching through Georgia." The Morris-Bolcom "After the Ball" team will be joined by chorus.
It's quite a jump from "We are coming, Sister Mary" to Milhaud, but that doesn't faze Nonesuch's renaissance man Bill Bolcom, who has a disc of his onetime teacher's piano works in the works.
Berman coming. It has been thirteen years since Harris Goldsmith reviewed in these pages an Artia-MK recital re cording by a "titanic" Russian pianist with "a big, assertive style similar to Rachmaninoff's," whose Debussy "eight-finger" etude "leaves all rivals far behind," whose Chopin "is brilliantly headlong" and "grandly inflected," and whose Scriabin is "superbly done." The titan's name? Lazar Berman, and that was the only re cording of his that we ever found generally available in the U.S. What ever happened to him? In Russia, he's a major concert attraction and has made a few other Melodiya recordings, but here he has been known to only a few piano aficionados, to whom he has become a sort of cult figure.
Next January, Berman, now forty five, will make his first American tour, and he is expected to return the following fall. Plans are also afoot for him to cut his first Western-made discs.
The electrifying Stoky. Ninety-three year-old Leopold Stokowski is still going strong. You may recall that it was only a few years ago that he left the U.S. for his native England because there wasn't enough recording activity going on here. At any rate, he is still making records, although he reportedly has "only now given up the idea of conducting live concerts." Our reporter, Edward Greenfield again, attended Stoky's latest session, a Scheherazade with the Royal Phil harmonic for RCA.
He reports: "Normally the visitor to recording sessions has to swallow the frustration of never hearing a work complete, or at least hearing it only in chopped-up form. Imagine my delight when Stokowski launched into the four movements in sequence. The night before, the RPO had played this very work under its principal conductor, Rudolf Kempe (about to move to the BBC Symphony, to be succeeded by Antal Dorati [who is relinquishing his post at the National Symphony in [...]
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(High Fidelity, Jul. 1975)
Also see: Letters--More Russian opera; Bravo Louisville; Brandenburg travesty