Glut glums

Alessandro Stradella (1643-1682)    
6 sinfonie for stringed instruments and basso continuo
Arranged by Nunzio Montanari (1915-1993) as     
‘Six Trio Sonatas’ for piano trio (piano, violin, cello)
Trio di Bolzano:
Nunzio Montanari (piano)
Giannino Carpi (violin)
Antonio Valisi (’cello)
recorded 1953(?), Italy; issued 1954
Vox PL 8380

Just dashing this off at the last minute, so that I’ll have posted at least once this year. Like many, I suspect, I have slight post-Christmas surfeit blues – not that I’ve put away anything like as much as I used to be able to. Time was, marzipan and meringues, lebkuchen and stollen, pandoro, panettone and panforte, mince pies and Christmas puddings were wolfed down with no ill effect. Now, teeth, gut and the system in general can’t cope, so that even moderate gluttony leaves me heavy and listless.

Nothing like as heavy and listless as being old, but that’s another story!

The real glut, of course, is recordings. More CDs, more 78s and LPs, more downloads, more transfers, more, more, more! Sometimes it’s exciting and stimulating, sometimes, as now, rather overwhelming, befuddling and deadening to the taste buds. Still, let’s never forget we live in the very best of times for us collectors and all the compulsively curious.

Talking of the curious, recently a dear friend asked if I have the above record. I was ashamed to find that not only do I have it, I’d made a transfer of it in April 2010 which I’ve never finished or shared! A quick listen confirmed it’s well worth it, so I spent quite a bit of time tidying it up and then working out what these pieces actually are. (They’re all from unpublished MSS; the originals can be found on IMSLP.)

Slightly annoyed to find that the Bibliothèque nationale de France beat me to it, which I should have thought of: its commercial ‘BnF Collection’ series offers a transfer of the French Boîte à Musique issue (samples here), available dirt cheap from Qobuz and other sites. I’ve had a listen and it’s pretty good. Still, I flatter myself mine is slightly better – or, rather, the original copy I transferred was probably in better condition, and unlike the BnF I can afford to ‘hand valet’ it.

The music itself is varied, if a little less so than if it had been left in its original scorings. But perhaps because Montanari, the pianist, made these arrangements (not, I don’t think, published), the Trio really owns them and plays with lovely, old-world expression. The LP gives only the country of recording; as it came out in early 1954, I’ve hazarded 1953, but it might even be 1952, as Valisi left the Trio the following year, according to this useful Italian Wikipedia entry.

This post also marks a new departure for the Cave: rather than upload the sound files (mono FLACs, as usual) and images to a storage site, I’ve decided to go with what for me is quickly becoming the first port of call for historical audio: the Internet Archive. Also, I could never get the embedded player gizmo to work here, whereas on the Internet Archive you can relish the art work’s ‘glorious Schmecknicolor’ while listening to the music, without having to download either. Though, actually, I haven’t worked out how to get the front cover to be shown by default, or how to make all images accessible in the neat, scrollable ‘Liner Notes’ thingy other Internet Archive pages have. If anyone knows how to do that, please say!

Anyway, enough of all that: the page you need is here.

Auguri!

No, hang on, I nearly forgot: this summer we spent part of a walking holiday in a lovely valley just above Bolzano, in the Italian Südtirol. It’s an absolutely fascinating and beautiful part of the world, rich in food, wine, wild flowers, architecture, history, industry and wild rivers. Montanari worked in Bolzano for decades and there’s still a thriving musical culture there and all around. And did I mention the wine?

Happy New Year!

Oh, and expect more in 2022!

Der Alte ja vergangen ist

‘Festival in Haiti’ 

Déclaration Paysanne (Meringue)
Pétro-Quita (Drum Rhythms)
Shango (Invocation)
Pennywhistle Fantasie
Solé Oh! (Invocation-Yanvalou)
 Méringue
Macaya Gimbo (Work Song)
Dié, Dié, Dié (Invocation-Zépaules)
 Mascaron-Pignitte (Carnival Rhythms)
 Ayanman Ibo (Ibo Rhythm)

Jean Léon Destiné (vocals), Alphone Cimber (drums),
Ti-Roro (drums), Herblee (pennywhistle), ensemble
recorded c.1954, New York?
Elektra EKL-30, p.1955

Drat – I didn’t mean to let 2019 pass without a single post. Well, there you have it – yet more proof of terminal decline etc., blah, blah… Worse, I started this post in April 2018 (same transfer but a completely different subject, which I don’t have the energy or time to write up now, sadly). That ground to a halt, as did pretty much all my ‘projects’ last year.

Now, though, I have a good excuse: I’m employed! My first full-time office job in 21½ years started in late October 2019. It’s only for a year but it comes with full benefits, including a pension. My boss is adorable, my colleagues are kind and helpful, the work is fascinating and right up my street, and our office is calm and civilized. It’s strange to be commuting again, squished up against a lot of young things, some probably yet unborn when I last rode the Tube like this… and no one was glued to a phone, either! (Still don’t own a smart phone.) (Do own other digital gizmos, though.) And this year I get my OAP’s free pass!

Anyway, to show I’m still alive and sentient (just), here’s a quick and dirty post to usher out 2019, in which the old me was suddenly and unexpectedly rejuvenated, and to usher in 2020, when I resolve to do all sorts of things to stave off the big D… like start dancing! Highly apposite to this post, as it happens: this lovely 10” LP isn’t your humble grump’s usual cerebral, sedentary fare, but celebrates the work of a famous Haitian dance artist. I confess I’d never heard of Jean-Léon Destiné (1918-2013) when I found this disc amongst my late father’s LPs a couple of years ago and gave it a spin. I was instantly impressed by the music, economical to the point of austerity in places but curiously gripping; the performances, full of authority, verve and conviction; the intimate, involving recording (which has come up nicely in this transfer, though I say so meself); and the proper grown-up presentation.

Don’t worry if you can’t read that sleeve note – there’s a bigger version of the scan in both Zip archives below, plus a PDF of the 12-page illustrated insert I found inside the sleeve. Of course, it’s now more than 60 years out of date but, again, worry not: there are several articles about and tributes to Destiné on the Web, such as this one, which looks very interesting.

So, take your pick: there are 10 lossless audio files, in FLAC or ALAC (Mac) formats, plus scans, in each Zip, which you can download from here (FLAC) or here (ALAC).

Happy New Year and enjoy!

(P.S. Not sure when I’ll get round to writing another post this year… but I’ll try my best!)

Pini Aroma

Mozart Divertimento in E flat K.563
Jean Pougnet (violin)
Frederick Riddle (viola)
Anthony Pini (cello)
rec. 12 to 18 September 1952, Konzerthaus(?), Vienna
by Westminster (USA)
transfer from 1965 UK issue on HMV CLP 1861   

Sorry about the dreadful pun – but LPs, and old electronics, do give off distinctive whiffs. Whenever I open the turntable on which I transferred this LP, I get a pleasing rubbery smell, which I think comes from the thick platter mat, trapped under the lid. It does a Proust, taking me back to my late father’s hi-fi and record cabinets (not to mention long, boring childhood journeys in hot cars with plastic upholstery), though I can’t honestly claim to remember the exact aroma of his various setups. Nor does this LP, from his shelves, smell of much: for one thing, HMV used translucent paper to line the inner sleeve, not the later polythene which has all too often degraded and left gunk on precious grooves.

No, this disc was and is in excellent condition, and hardly needed cleaning up. I imagine few surviving copies of the original Westminster issues (on WL 5191 and XWN 18551), not to mention the first UK issue of late 1954 (on Nixa WLP 5191), would sound better – those pressings were never too good. Maybe the French Véga issue was better (sample a commercial transfer here, or even buy it here). The recording is close (which I like) and vivid, and I just love this performance. Love the work, too, which always seems to bring out the best in players, and I never tire of hearing new versions, but I’m esepecially fond of this one. I hope you enjoy it too!

I haven’t got the time and energy to do a full bio-/discographical job on the musicians – and I don’t need to, as all three are well known. What may not be so well known is that Jean Pougnet (1907-68) made his first documented recordings in early 1926 for the National Gramophonic Society – playing second viola alongside André Mangeot’s Music Society String Quartet in Purcell’s Fantasia ‘upon one note’ and Vaughan Williams’ Phantasy String Quintet. Transfers of both may be downloaded from the CHARM website: the Purcell consists of just one sound file, plus label, while the Vaughan Williams is on four sides – 1, 2, 3, 4 – plus label 1, etc. (The Vaughan Williams is also the worst-sounding recording issued by the N.G.S.)

Frederick Riddle (1912-95) was the only one of these three musicians born in England: Pougnet was born in Mauritius, and Anthony Pini (1902-89) in Argentina, as Carlos Antonio. All became stalwarts of Britain’s orchestral, chamber music and teaching worlds. I’m indebted to Tully Potter, the leading historian of string players and chamber music, whose obituary of Riddle (The Strad, May 1995) relates that, before the war, Pougnet and Pini played and broadcast together with William Primrose as the London String Trio. After the war, Riddle replaced Primrose, although the name was taken up by a different trio of players. Our three had also played together in the Philharmonia String Quartet, which Walter Legge formed from his Philharmonia Orchestra, and, before that, in the BBC Salon Orchestra.

Tully also told me that the ad hoc trio made its first batch of recordings for Westminster in Vienna, in one week – this Mozart, and string trios by Beethoven, Lennox Berkeley, Haydn, and Charles Henry Wilton. This explains why Michael Gray’s discography site gives a range of dates – it also names the Konzerthaus as venue for some of the week’s work (I’m guessing it was used for all). The second batch, recorded in autumn 1954, consisted of trios by Dohnányi, Françaix and Hindemith. I believe none of this legacy has been reissued on CD (from tape – the Beethoven, Dohnányi & Françaix and Wilton trios have been transferred from discs by Forgotten Records), a grievous omission, though not surprising. I do have more dubs, which I may share if they’re good enough, and if I have time…

Meanwhile, you can download this transfer of K.563, as six fully-tagged mono FLACs plus sleeve scans, in a Zip file, from here.

As for the work, I reckon this was its fifth complete recording. The Pasquier Trio of France made the first, in June 1935, for Pathé (transferred to CD by Green Door of Japan); also issued in Britain and the USA on Columbia (transferred by The Shellackophile). They re-recorded it after the war for Les Discophiles Français (again transferred from disc by Green Door); issued in the US initially on Vox, and then by the Haydn Society (the latter remastered from tape by Music and Arts). Meanwhile, Heifetz, Primrose and Feuermann had recorded it for Victor in September 1941; a well-known set, transferred by Biddulph, Opus Kura and probably others.

Less well known are one of the Menuetti (but which?), recorded by members of the Budapest Quartet for American Columbia in February 1945, but not issued until 1950 as a filler for the (obsolescent) 78 rpm set of Schubert’s ‘Trout’ Quintet with Mieczysław Horszowski and Georges Moleux; and a complete recording, made in April and May 1951 by the Bel Arte Trio (Ruth Posselt, Joseph dePasquale and Samuel Mayes) for US Decca, issued in the UK on Brunswick, and never, to my knowledge, reissued (as if…) or transferred.

The biggest rarity and oddity, though, must be a Tilophan ‘Spiel mit’ set of extracts, seemingly one or both Menuetti, with the violin, viola and cello parts not played (by unnamed players) on successive sides. This was available by January 1938, when it was listed in a French magazine. If anyone owns or has ever seen any of these, do let me know!

A Pox on Grails

The only grail I own is this tiny cup. I won it at school in 1976 – yes, don’t laugh, in them days I was quite nippy – on account of being in the winning under-17s 4 x 100m house relay team. I was the anchor, and my charming comrades later regaled me with descriptions of my competitors gaining on me over the home stretch. Team sports? Humbug.

This, though, is definitely not a grail, despite what you’ll read if you ever try to buy a copy.

H.M.V. CLPC 15
Tchaikovsky, Borodin String Quartets
Haydn Quartet of Brussels:
Georges Maes, Louis Hertogh,
Louis Logie, René Pousseele
rec. 30-Aug-56, location unknown (Brussels?)

It’s a very good record, but not because it’s ‘super-rare’ or ‘the holy grail of classical collecting’ etc. etc. (That seems to be Pathé’s set ‘Mozart à Paris’ – and altarware-fetishists are welcome to it, as I’m more than happy with my EMI CDs, thank you very much. Yes, I know the Andante K.315 is missing.)

The Haydn Quartet’s discography is small, and all over it hangs this graily pall. As far as I know, these are the sum total of original issues:

Maurice Schoemaker String Quartet in D
Decca 143.383 (10-inch)

Marinus de Jong String Quartet No.4
‘in Antique Modes’
Decca 143.384, Olympia LPT 3312  (10-inch)

Mozart String Quartets in Bb K.458, F K.590
HMV CLPC 14

Tchaikovsky, Borodin String Quartets
HMV CLPC 15

Mozart String Quartet in G K.387
Telefunken LGM 65011, LB 6035 (10-inch)
rec. 4-Oct-52, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels

Peter Benoît Myn môederspraak
as ‘Haydn Kwintet’ with S.(?) Demoustier (viola II),
Nina Bolotine (mezzo-soprano),
and Suzanne Sternefeld de Backer (harp),
coupled with piano works played by Yvonne van den Berghe
Philips N 10495 R (10-inch)
(My thanks to ‘LPCollector’ for alerting me to this disc)

If anyone can add to the above, I’d be very grateful. Was Olympia’s de Jong the origination or a reissue? Did Olympia also issue the Schoemaker? (And what else was on Olympia?)

The Mozart quartets have been transferred from LPs and issued in Japan, by Green Door on CD (GD-2041), and by Mythos Lord (see?) on a variety of CDRs (NR-6046 plus various suffixes, depending I suppose on how much gold you require on your plastic). The Mozart and Tchaikovsky quartets have also been transferred from LPs and issued on CDR by Forgotten Records (thanks again to ‘LPCollector’ for alerting me to this disc).

In 1978, Belgium’s Fonds Georges Maes issued a 3-LP set entitled ‘Georges Maes een aandenken’ / ‘Georges Maes en mémoire’. It too contains the three Mozart quartets, plus the Tchaikovsky, and there’s other material from broadcasts. Somewhere in the Cave is a copy of this box, but I can’t lay my hands on it at the moment. If memory serves, which these days it tends to less and less, I believe the quartets are also taken from LPs.

I know of no other transfers, much less reissues from original master tapes. And that’s what makes me grumpy about this chalice-chasing. If everyone the world over who covets the Haydn Quartet’s LPs clubbed together, and put up even a fraction of what the originals cost, surely there’d be enough to mount a commando raid on the lock-up, extract the tapes, dub them and then slip them back, with a box of Milk Tray, before anyone notices? Or even enough to pay the men in suits – though I gather they’ve got greedy of late.

Still, this is a nice record, and I flatter myself that it has scrubbed up very well. I tried to leave in all the bow noises and chair creaks, and there’s some foot stamping and other noises off. The performances are simply lovely, and I very much like the close, dry, slightly boxy sound - that’s how most instrumental records were balanced until the present fashion for ecclesiastical bathrooms.

I have now ascertained the recording date (see above ) but not the venue. My guess is Brussels, like the session(s) for the Quartet’s sole Telefunken LP, which I got from Michael Gray’s indispensable ‘A Classical Discography’.

I have also been put right about H.M.V.’s suffix –C export LP series – for which I’m very grateful to ‘Boursin’ (see comments, below). A few questions remain. Were these LPs routinely available in export markets, or only by special order? I mean, could one just walk into a classical record shop in Belgium in the later 1950s and buy this, or did one have to know about it and order it specially? Is that why are the Haydn Quartet LPs so rare? Seems a shame that even the Belgians didn’t get to enjoy one of their finest ensembles more. Clearly, I’ve a lot to learn. Further answers gratefully received!

By the way, don’t get me wrong: I’ve nothing against collectors – I am one myself – or original copies of obsolete recording formats. Clearly, where master tapes have been destroyed or lost (a sackable offence, in my view), an original is the only source of a recording. Even after being transferred, it should be preserved rather than being discarded, as so often happened in the past. Not only are transfer equipment and techniques constantly evolving, the originals are interesting commercial, aesthetic and historical objects. I know some people like to play original records on original equipment, and they can sound very good. I’d just prefer a digital reissue from master tapes – which, in any case, need to be preserved before it’s too late. That’s if the masters survive – shouldn’t we at least find out?

In the meantime, download the 8 mono FLACs, fully tagged (except for exact recording date – apologies), in a .rar archive, plus images, here.

Not waving but WAVing – and DAWing

Brahms String Quartet in B flat Op.67
Quartetto Italiano:
Paolo Borciani & Elisa Pegreffi (violins),
Piero Farulli (viola), Franco Rossi (cello)
Columbia 33CX 1244
(rec. July 1954 or January 1955?, Milan)

Sorry, I’ve had this blasted record almost ready to go for weeks… Unfortunately, entropy is wreaking havoc in the Cave. Some of my old audio kit is finally breaking, but I’m too mean to throw it out and buy replacements. So I rummage around at the back of the Cave for older kit to press back into service – which my aging brain can only half-remember how to connect and operate. And then I’m too lazy to face the resulting cumbersome workarounds anyway.

So what happened is this: I started digitally cleaning up a transfer of this really lovely LP which I’d made quite some time ago. It seemed to be going swimmingly – until the second movement, which turned out to be riddled with nasties. The third was little better – and then, to add insult to injury, I found two minute but audible drop-outs. (Until a few months ago, I dubbed all LPs onto CDRWs in a semi-pro CD recorder, which has finally died. It did very occasionally leave drop-outs, as did ripping the CDRWs to my newer PC.) Blast – I’d have to fire up my ancient SCSI-based SADiE DAW (‘digital audio workstation’), on an almost equally ancient, incredibly noisy XP PC, with barely less noisy external SCSI enclosures, and see if I could remember how to do the fine editing that was second nature to me for so many years!

Well, today I finally did it, and here’s the result. The drop-outs have gone, though I suspect I’d have done a better job in my younger days. The pops, clicks and thumps are gone too, though there’s still quite a lot of surface noise – well worth it, if you ask me: this is a wonderful performance of one of my favourite string quartets. I surprised someone just last week (now, who was it?…) with the fervency of my love for the Brahms quartets, which only increases the more recordings I hear (I can’t remember the last time I heard one in concert). And of the three, Op.67 is closest to my heart, with its the perfect Brahmsian combo of gruff bonhomie, sometimes anguished lyricism, cross-rhythms, moments of stillness, and always the long but comforting shadows of the past… The Quartetto Italiano plays it beautifully, emphasizing the lyrical side, taking plenty of time over the reflective bits, but with plenty of thigh-slapping gusto in those ‘hunting’ passages that also remind me of a Tyrolean Plattler.

This is a reproach to EMI (now Warner) for allowing so much of the Quartetto Italiano’s superb legacy of Columbia LPs to slumber unheard for so long. Universal has a lot to answer for, too: yes, the Quartetto’s  later Brahms appeared on mid-priced CDs, but not its Schumann, coupled with the Brahms on the original Philips LPs. (That was issued on CD only in Japan – as usual…) Universal is at last making good, its big box of the Quartetto Italiano’s supposedly ‘Complete Decca, Philips & DG recordings’ (including the Duriums, I hope?) due out any day. But no sign of the like from Warner…

Sorry if these sleeve scans seem a funny colour – my monitor shows everything too pink, so I don’t know what to believe (I wish I wasn’t too stupid and lazy to learn colour calibration). There’s also disagreement about the recording date. One rather good Quartetto Italiano website says January 1955, but the selfless and highly respected discographer Michael H. Gray says July 1954.

Download the 4 mono, fully-tagged FLACs, in a .rar file here.

I’ll now have to record LPs (and 78s, I hope, soon) either onto my newer PC, which is fab – but I won’t feel happy working while I’m dubbing, as even the best machine is prone to glitches if it has to do two tricky things at once – or onto my old SADiE, which means cables trailing under my feet. And it puts the occasional digital splat across the audio, and I don’t like the sound of the A-D converter I’m now using, as much as the one in my Sony DAT recorder, through which I used to feed the signal into my CDR. Nope, I’m just going to have to get some new kit…

A disc of two halves

Dvořák Piano Trio in e Op.90 ‘Dumky’; Trio in g Op.26
Jean Fournier (violin),
Antonio Janigro (cello),
Paul Badura-Skoda (piano)
rec. mid-(?) and late 1950s
first issued 1958(?), on Westminster XWN 18398
issued in Britain on HMV CLP 1737 (above)

I’ve recently managed to expel a good many boxes of LPs from the Cave, to the delight of La Grumpy. I sold 4 or 5, and gave away another 8. Before we took the latter to the charity / thrift / op shop, I had a last flip through – thank goodness, as I’d overlooked this lovely disc. My antennae told me it hasn’t been issued on CD (from the master tapes), which turned out to be correct – and a pity, as I really like it. Or, at least, the first half – the ‘Dumky’ Trio, which I’ve recently fallen in love with.

There’s something mysterious about this coupling. In the American journal Notes, Kurtz Myers used to publish a quarterly ‘Index of Record Reviews: With Symbols Indicating Opinions of Reviewers’ (later gathered into a series of books entitled Record Ratings). Most discs of mainstream repertoire such as this garnered a healthy crop of notices in several of the two dozen or so magazines surveyed by Myers. But in the December 1958 ‘Index’, Westminster XWN 18398 has the bare note, ‘No reviews’. Does anyone know why?

Another oddity is the noticeable difference in quality between the two sides. The first side, containing ‘Dumky’, sounds like a state of the art late mono recording, although it’s longer, so there’s more end-of-side distortion; and on my copy of this British H.M.V. pressing, it’s in less good condition – I suspect because the owner preferred ‘Dumky’, as I do, and so played it more often, with his heavy pick-up. The second side sounds earlier: congested, almost saturated in places – the signature, to my ears, of less refined equipment rather than poor microphone placement, as the balance itself is not bad. This leads me to suspect that Op.26 was recorded some time before Op.90, and/or in a different venue – again, does anyone know? Any clarification gratefully received.

‘Dumky’ – sorry to go on about it - is a much better piece than Op.26, don’t you think? The highlight of the g minor work, for me, is the charming, disarmingly ingénu trio, with its nothing tune, and those dotted ’cello kicks giving its relaxed dance rhythm a propulsive momentum which is unmistakably Czech. But, oh dear, the finale – another dance, interrupted by some academic note-spinning and muddy harmonies. A world away from the free-wheeling, rhapsodic, unpredictable, innovative ‘Dumky’. I’m looking forward to getting to know other classic recordings of the piece, some of which are pretty hard to find.

I gather ‘Dumky’ is in six sections, but the Simrock score I downloaded has five, so I went with that – sorry. If you prefer the canonical six sections, just divide the first of my files at 4:18 (fig. D, Poco adagio). The nine fully tagged, mono FLACs, plus my photos of the front and back of the HMV sleeve, including the extensive sleeve-note by Irving Kolodin, are in a .rar file which can be downloaded from here.

“Buxtehude, Headmaster!”

 

Buxtehude
Herr, nun läßt du deinen Diener BuxWV 37
Quemadmodum desiderat cervus, ciaccona BuxWV 92
*Lobe den Herrn, meine Seele BuxWV 71
Helmut Krebs (tenor),
instrumental ensemble / *Berlin Bach Orchestra strings,
Carl Gorvin (organ / *conductor)
Archiv Produktion ARC 3096 [APM 14088 / 14529]
(rec. 29-30 October 1956, *25 October 1957,
Jesus-Christus-Kirche, Berlin-Dahlem)

Apologies: I started this post in September 2013, and almost immediately abandoned it. A couple of things, which I’ll come to later, have prompted me to revive it.

When I first saw Lindsay Anderson’s 1968 film If, a satire on British boys’ boarding schools and their traditional cruelty, I was still attending one myself, I think. I’d already gone potty for classical music and I’d probably come across the great Dane, played on one of our school’s fine organs – but back then, it was Messiaen’s L’Ascension and La nativité which really blew me away. I missed it at the time but much later, a friend reminded me of a pithy line, spoken by If’s fictional chaplain, after being asked what music the organ was playing as the boys exited Chapel:

‘Padre, that was a super voluntary you gave us this morning. What was it, 18th century?’ ‘Buxtehude, Headmaster!’

Actually, it was the Toccata from Widor’s Symphony No.5. What does this mean?, asks a perplexed punter on IMDb. It could mean any number of things; to me, it’s a brief but dense joke at the expense of that system of education. The raison d’être of British ‘public’ schools, supposedly, was the fostering in boys of  something which still sends shivers down my spine: ‘team spirit’. Now, a team needs a captain; in If’s joke, as I read it, he is the headmaster. To lead, the captain needs to know what’s going on. So he asks his subordinate – here, the chaplain – who obliges with the kind of misinformation which led to mass slaughter in the trenches etc., magnificently sent up in the final shoot-out of Anderson’s film. (I suspect there’s a also a dig at a certain strand of British musical philistinism: of course, nobody can be expected to know everything – but Widor’s Toccata, for goodness’ sake…)

Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle
down with skool!
London: Max Parrish & Co. Ltd., 1958
1968 Armada paperback, originally my friend Stephen’s
(did I nick it or did he give it to me?…)

At the same time, the padre’s Buxtehude joke celebrates genuine strengths of British public schools: eccentricity, contrarianism, subversion, delight in the arcane. These are celebrated traits of wider British culture, obviously: but the schools’ contradictory totalitarianism (the sole advantage of right-wing tyrannies) – ‘team spirit’ and muscular Christianity versus unworldly academicism and dubious ancient poems – creates convenient corners for them to sprout in. Any boarding-school survivor watching If would have known masters and fellow-pupils with unusual tastes and obsessive interests. Unlike the conformist rebels who made a predictable song and dance of their rebellion, these resisted silently, with jokes and sabotage comprehensible to almost no one. Hence: ‘Buxtehude, Headmaster.’

At school, I was apparently the only friend of a kindly loner who introduced me to H.P. Lovecraft and who, a year or so later, shot himself during the holidays (which, my housemaster seemed to imply as he reported my friend’s suicide to me one evening, was my fault…). Another friend, to our matron’s disgust, spent his time publishing papers on subatomic particle physics, instead of washing; he’s now one of the world’s leading computer scientists. Others formed a consort of viols: hearing them play sparked a hunger for early music which I still feed almost every day.

Talking of which, back to Buxtehude. What has prompted me to revisit this post is a) guilt at neglecting Grumpy’s groupies, b) buying this box a couple of weeks ago, and c) listening to all of it for the first time, finishing just a few hours ago:

Buxtehude Opera Omnia
Bruhns Complete Organ Works
Amsterdam Baroque Choir and Orchestra,
Ton Koopman (organ / harpsichord / conductor)
(recorded September 2005 – June 2013)
Challenge Classics CC772261 (29 CDs, 1 DVD, 6 booklets)

If, like me, you’re a Buxtehude bore, you’ll probably have to have this box. It’s expensive in Britain (much more so than in Europe), but I was lucky and happened to check the price on a day when it was discounted by 40%. There’s probably too much vocal music in the box for all but us Lübeck loonies, and the best pieces are well distributed across the vocal CDs, making it difficult to recommend one. So my quick picks are the very first volume, 2 CDs of harpsichord music including the monumental variations on ‘La Capricciosa’, any of the organ CDs – OK, start with the cracking Volume VIII / Organ Works 3 – and eight wonderful unpublished sonatas, in Volume XII / Chamber Music 1.

Nor will I compare the recordings on the Archiv LP, made nearly sixty years ago, with those in this box – but the earlier ones have nothing to fear from any comparison. Helmut Krebs was in his prime, and his voice, fresh and light, would surely be the envy of any ‘HIP’ tenor today. The instrumental ensemble is no bigger than the ones employed by Koopman:

[NOTE: the other two works on the LP, Ich bin eine Blume zu Saron BuxWV 45, and Ich suchte des Nachts BuxWV 50, are equally if not more beautiful. But I haven’t transferred them, as they were reissued in 2000, on a CD in DG’s Fischer-Dieskau 75 Edition, coupled with Bach’s two most famous cantatas for low male voice, BWV 56 and 82. A self-recommending disc, it’s deleted but not too hard to find:

Bach, Buxtehude Sacred vocal music
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Helmut Krebs,
Karl Richter, Carl Gorvin
DG 463 517-2]

Three of these recordings were premieres: BuxWV 92 and 71 (with Krebs only) and BuxWV 50 (with Fischer-Dieskau and Krebs). The Swiss tenor Max Meili had recorded BuxWV 37 in about 1950 for Concert Hall (E-5); and the bass Bruno Müller, with Hans Grischkat on Vox (PL 7620), beat Fischer-Dieskau to BuxWV 45 by about 5 years. (I’ve never seen either LP – they don’t seem common.) Given that, one marvels at the fluency, assurance and ‘rightness’ of the performances on the Archiv LP.

You can download the three mono, fully tagged FLACs, in a .rar file, from here.

Koopman’s Opera Omnia box includes a touching written tribute to Bruno Grusnick (1900-1992), the German musicologist who studied, edited, published and championed Buxtehude’s vocal music, discovering many unique manuscripts in the Düben Collection in Uppsala. (I’ve always coveted Grusnick’s beautiful Buxtehude editions as published by Ugrino. They don’t seem at all common.) Grusnick wrote a very good note for the Archiv LP, and I think I forgot to include sung texts in the .rar file, so I’ve uploaded a text file with both (only the bits relevant to the works I’ve transferred), here.

I’m sorry if this upload seems a bit stingy. I had also intended to offer another Buxtehude LP recorded by Archiv in 1956, of four substantial sacred vocal pieces, charmingly sung by the Norddeutscher Singkreis conducted by Gottfried Wolters – but that has been transferred for the Bibliothèque nationale’s BnF Collection series of downloads, in very acceptable sound, and as I write it is for sale on Qobuz in lossless format and high resolution, priced at next to nothing. I’m not sure why Krebs’s LP hasn’t also been transferred – maybe it will – but I urge you to support the BnF Collection, both for its own sake and because I’m hoping the Bibliothèque nationale will make enough money from it to transfer and market their 78s.

Not Lübeck but somewhere very like it:
Transept organ (Bis & Destré, 1653),
St. Bavo’s Cathedral, Ghent, Belgium,
6 April 2015

You’re probably bored of waiting for me to get my act together and post more stuff. Once again, I’m sorry. I keep inventing time- (and money-)wasting things to do, instead of decluttering the Cave, publishing my thesis, finding funding for my academic research and setting up a 78 transfer chain. But the last will happen, I promise – I just don’t know when. I have bought so much interesting stuff which I simply must share, including lots of historic Buxtehude. Thank you for your patience.

Nuper doctus, saepe dolens

Once again, as so often before, I must apologise for my long silence. I suspected that finishing and submitting my thesis and finally being awarded a PhD would not make me more efficient, dynamic, proactive etc. – and I was right! Since getting the degree in July I’ve done… very little. Except: buy more 78s, LPs and CDs, a new laptop, books and DVDs and, not least, unnecessary camera gear (I have bad GAS*) – unnecessary because, as you can see, it hasn’t improved my photography. Instead, I should be buying the audio equipment I need to transfer my 78s.

To give you an idea of my accumulation of stuff, here’s the subject of this post, posed in a corner of the clutter that has increasingly taken over the Cave during the last six and a half years:

Dowland Lachrimae (1604)
Schola Cantorum Basiliensis Viola da Gamba Quintet:
August Wenzinger (treble viol)
Hannelore Müller, Marianne Majer (tenor viols)
Jan Crafoord, Johannes Koch (bass viols)
Eugen Müller-Dombois (lute) 
Deutsche Harmonia Mundi 1C 065-99 604
rec. date & location n/a, p.1962

This is one of the latest LPs which can scrape through Europe’s restrictive, regressive and rentier-minded revised copyright legislation. Although I wonder if it wasn’t recorded slightly earlier than the publication date stated on the sleeve: the grainy stereo sound gives off a whiff of the late 1950s which can’t be entirely due to my transcription. It’s from a much later, German Electrola pressing; the first issue was in France, on Harmonia Mundi HM30623 (mono only, I believe). The group certainly recorded one LP in France, in Paris in April 1958 (also, as far as I know, issued only in mono, on Erato LDE 3083, which I have and hope to transfer and share). On the other hand, this sleeve credits WDR’s Alfred Krings as producer, so maybe I’m talking rubbish. Still, if it was recorded in Germany, does anyone know why wasn’t it issued there (or in stereo) until 1978?

It’s less strange than regrettable that this LP has never been reissued on CD, since I reckon it was the first complete and ‘proper’ recording of that masterpiece of English consort music, Lachrimae. Earlier efforts were either incomplete (a pity, in the case of Dennis Nesbitt’s fine but slightly abridged disc, which I transferred and shared elsewhere some years ago) or monkeyed about with (much as I admire Thurston Dart, I still don’t understand why he recorded early consort music, including Lachrimae, using quasi-orchestral forces). Here, we have the ensemble which I find best suited to this music, a five-part viol consort with lute.

And not just any old ensemble: a group of true pioneers, whose director had been recording Baroque ensemble music on period instruments since the 1930s. August Wenzinger badly needs a biographer – shockingly, the SCB makes little of him on its website, though it does have a special room in its library named after him and his colleague Ina Lohr (what’s in it?). I was lucky enough to meet not only Wenzinger but also the wonderful Marianne Majer and Hannelore Müller, all three at the latter’s house outside Basle, not long before Wenzinger’s death in 1996 (I’m not sure if the others are still alive). I must write about that experience some other time, or you’ll never get through this post.

Now, while I respect and admire Wenzinger for his achievements and legacy, here his tuning and tone are occasionally a little off, to my ears; and, like many of his recorded performances, this might at first strike you as a little dry and uninvolved – Nesbitt’s recording was notably more expressive. Although Lachrimae is recorded complete, I would have liked all repeats. Still, there’s more than enough evidence here of the Swiss group’s deep love of and absorption in what is one of my favourite works of any genre, time or country. If you’d like to know more about Lachrimae – much more, about its content, context, prehistory and reception and everything else you can think of – you simply must read Peter Holman’s slim, superb monograph in the Cambridge Music Handbooks series.

“You never know when it might come in handy…”

The more I listened to this neglected record, the more I enjoyed it. And I listened a lot – I nearly went mad cleaning up the LP. That’s the trouble with stereo, you see – not only does it not benefit from the magical noise-reduction effect of monoing, there are individual nasties on each groove wall, which have to be hunted down and dealt with separately (that is, if ClickRepair hasn’t already done it). This recording is also closely miked (unlike the swimmy ones DHM would soon make in the Cedar Hall of the Fugger family seat, Schloss Kirchheim), picking up frequent touches of bows and fingers on strings – which are often hard to tell from vinyl clicks and pops. The close perspective doesn’t do the playing style many favours, either, helping the fairly constant vibrato to muddy the sound. Other problems remain, such as occasional slight drop-outs (not surprising, since this LP was mastered from a 20-year old tape) and audible edits.

This post has also taken me much longer than usual because I had serious problems uploading the files to my storage site. I’ve had a free account there since 2008 and rarely had any trouble uploading my transfers. But when I tried to upload this a couple of weeks ago, absolutely nothing worked. The site’s opaque and misleading error messages made me think its policies had changed and I needed to start paying – so I did (there was a special offer). Well, whad’ya know? Still couldn’t upload anything, not even the smallest image or a message to Customer Support.

After a long call to the US (friendly enough, despite the standard
‘Switch everything off and on again’), it dawned on me that my ISP is to blame. Grumpy emails are often labelled as luncheon meat by other ISPs’ servers, if not bounced back, since my company is apparently black-listed as hosting real purveyors of such viands. Which? recently reported that it enjoys a ‘Customer score’ of 47%. And my upload speed? 0.5 Mbps, which amazed my Customer Support person. Sure enough, when I went to a fellow-collector’s cave, I was able to upload the files via his internet connection without a problem. I’ll be switching soon. Ideally, I’d like to switch countries - notoriously, Britain’s broadband provision is among the worst in Europe, never mind everything else that’s wrong with it.

Anyway, download the 21 stereo, fully-tagged FLAC files, in 2 .rar archives, from here and here.

Fools are everywhere…

*GAS = Gear Acquisition Syndrome

Cape with Good Hope (8 Down, 1 To Go!)

Josquin 14 secular chansons
Pro Musica Antiqua, dir. Safford Cape
EMS 213 (rec. autumn 1950, Brussels)

On Thursday 26th April, I finished the penultimate chapter of my PhD thesis, which is the main thing that’s been keeping me from posting more coprolites from the Cave. Chapter 8 is three times longer than it should be and has taken me months to write, rather than the mere weeks I’d projected. Oh well, I’ve learned a lot in the process. Now I just need to re-read it plus the preceding seven, all 320 pages, before I tackle what I’ve been dreading – the final chapter, with my supposed ‘conclusions’. My main conclusion is, I don’t know what to conclude!

As a tiny celebration (and distraction), here is one of the too many LPs I’ve bought recently. In fact, I already had two copies of this lovely disc but they looked too beaten up to dub – it’s hard to tell, as they’re pressed on red vinyl, which is pretty but doesn’t show scratches or dirt. I’m trying to collect as many records of this great group as I can. I’ve just bought a couple more good uns, so we could be in for a Cape bonanza.

This record is remarkable in several ways. First, remember that in 1950 devoting an entire LP to one prehistoric composer was seriously avant-garde. Second, the sleeve carries detailed information on the music and performances, texts and translations, although not, oddly, the group’s line-up (singers of solo items are credited). Third, and most important, these are really fine performances, which present the wonderful music simply, seriously, and with complete conviction. The famous and glorious Deploration on the death of Ockeghem is here - I’ve never enjoyed it as much. Also deeply moving are Malheur me bat (which spawned several parody masses) and Incessamment mon povre cueur lamente, the latter sung with noble dolour by the great Jeanne Deroubaix. I really like the instrumentals, too – the close miking brings the gently raspy, gutty, hairy sounds into sharp focus and creates an atmosphere of intimacy and concentration – no hey-nonny-nonsense here.

The recording struggles a bit with some of the vocal numbers, though that could also be wear on my copy. Or my arm, which I never rebalance, as I should. Still, it’s come up pretty well. I see that in 1961 Archiv issued an LP devoted to Josquin, with a mass and some of the same chansons, performed by Pro Musica – but they must be re-recordings, as it was also issued in stereo (APM 14171, SAPM 198171) and I don’t believe Archiv went in for fake stereo (does anyone have it or know?). By the way, I’ve not checked if modern musicology still thinks all this is by Josquin.

Download the 14, fully tagged mono FLAC files, plus my not very good but legible scan of the back of the sleeve (my stupid A3 scanner has a chamfered border round the platen which just prevents LP covers from lying flat!), in a .rar file, here.

Tomorrow, Sunday 29th April, Jolyon and I are off to sell some 78s and LPs at the Croydon Record Fair – and probably buy far too many as well! See you there?

ADDENDUM: Listening again, I’ve remembered that the levels as originally mastered are a bit all over the place: the first  item, an instrumental, is too high compared to the vocal number which follows; several vocals sound a bit low. But I haven’t altered any levels. Also, if it had been up to me I would have ended the disc with the Deploration rather than Basiez-moi. But there you go, I’m sure Ockeghem would have agreed that life must go on, eh?

CORRIGENDUMDIDUMDIDUM: Doltishly, I included earlier versions of two files in the .rar; these both have ‘OLD’ in the file-name. The only difference from the newer versions is that I hadn’t faded out the residual surface noise at the end of one, which closes side 1, or faded it in at the start of the next, which opens side 2 with rather more noise. Sic errat Grumpius.

By the ungracious condescension of His Grouch the Archgrump

Beethoven Piano Trio in Bb Op.97 ‘Archduke’
Loveridge-Martin-Hooton Trio
rec. 1958/59?
World Record Club T[P] 36

Grumble. Mumble. Wumble! Mutter. Splutter. Whinge. Grizzle. Grouse. Kvetch. Rouspète. Râle.

On the other hand, what a nice chap who sold me this via eBay. Very happy. Thank you.

The sleeve says ‘T 36’ but the labels say ‘TP 36’ – anyone know why? The labels also say, rather charmingly, ‘First issued 1939’! As it happens, I have seen the WRC supplement for June-July 1959 which lists this LP. I don’t know of a stereo issue; the Club was already putting out stereo records but only of orchestral music, as far as I can make out.

Iris Loveridge is quite well represented on CD, by a 3-CD set of Bax’s piano music and a mixed recital of Moeran and Gordon Jacob, all on Lyrita. There’s an excellent article about her by Rob Barnett on Musicweb International. Loveridge also made other LPs and 78s.

Florence Hooton currently has just one CD to her name, also on Lyrita, of ’cello music by Bax and Jacob. She appears on many 78s, in different trios (one with Frederick Grinke) and duos (one with Gerald Moore). On CHARM, you can hear her playing Sammartini and – wait for it – Webern’s String Trio! (Unfortunately, she has been spelled ‘Hooteon’ in CHARM’s metadata for the Webern.) I found a short obituary in a music journal, which told me that she died aged 75 in 1988, a highly respected teacher, and had studied with Emanuel Feuermann.

In 1938 Hooton married the Canadian-born violinist David Martin, who is written up by Giles Bryant in the wonderfully useful Canadian Encyclopedia. From that, I learn that Martin studied with Kathleen Parlow, led the Philharmonic String Trio and after the War founded his own String Quartet and Piano Trio. Martin made 78s and LPs with all groups, as well as with the Boyd Neel String Orchestra; a fair number have been reissued on CD.

I really like this record. The sound is a little iffy: at the start the piano is too recessed and almost sounds like a Graf or Beethoven’s own Broadwood. But I love the sound Loveridge gets from it: it has a gentle, plummy quality which makes me suspect it’s an old-fashioned, less famous make, possibly British? The recorded balance is not ideal (not easy, recording piano trios, I know) and, on my otherwise nice copy of this LP, there is distortion on some peaks at the end.

This is excellent music-making of the second rank, the kind of thing the self-appointed arbiters (arbiter?) of taste at RMCR don’t want you to hear, still less enjoy. By ‘second rank’, I only mean in comparison to international stars. The performance really comes into its own in the slow movement, where Loveridge achieves a serene, generous calm. After a well managed transition, the finale is unruffled but purposeful, rather than hectic. Yet there is power in reserve.

It’s also the kind of performance, I imagine, one might have heard at, say, the South Place Sunday Concerts in the 1950s. I recently went to the Concerts’ home for many decades, the Conway Hall, for the first time, I’m ashamed to say, to hear Beethoven’s ‘Ghost’ and two other piano trios played with passionate commitment by a young ensemble led by a friend, the gifted and versatile Australian violinist Madeleine Easton.

The ‘Ghost’ slightly showed up its neighbours, even Mendelssohn’s Op.66. And with the ‘Archduke’, we’re in yet another league. What a work. This is what it’s all about, eh? In a sense, I’m only here because of the ‘Archduke’. In 1982, helping to decorate my parents’ house during the university summer holidays, I listened non-stop to BBC Radio Three and, one day, while I was blow-torching paint from a door frame or a skirting board (or was I sand-papering stair balusters?), someone put on the Cortot-Thibaud-Casals version.

Bingo. Damascus. That was the single experience which opened my ears to the pleasure – not only the value and the interest, the sheer pleasure – of historical recordings. Soon after, I went to the Music Discount Centre, newly opened in Dean Street, and bought the Opal LP transfer. And the rest is grumpiness.

Because I didn’t want to separate the last two movements, only three mono, fully tagged FLACs, in a .rar file, here.

Snarl. Gnash. Fume. Grind. Introspect! Curse. Blast. Seethe…

De la grotte de Grumpy… à Versailles

Fastes et divertissements de Versailles
Volume V: l’instrument soliste
Louis Marchand, Louis-Nicolas Clérambault
Pièces de clavecin
Marcelle Charbonnier (harpsichord)
rec. March 1955, Paris
Philips L1L 0011

Yes, I’ve been grumpier than usual. I’m grumpy pretty much all day, every day. What with the mess in the Cave, the hoohah about internet file-sharing, the crass criminality of some sharers, the bullying obstructionism of some record companies who seem hell-bent on scuppering this wonderful distribution channel, the poisonous pettiness of certain posters on RMCR, the sudden surge of cowboy sellers (I’ve recently bought several shamefully mis-described second-hand CDs), I’m just GRUMPY!

And I’m barely progressing with my work.

Never mind, here’s a lovely divertissement from what I should be doing. This LP contains all the published harpsichord music of these composers. (A big manuscript with more Marchand has since turned up.) It’s the last in a lovely series of luxuriously presented gatefold albums surveying the pomp and pleasures of Versailles, issued ‘under the patronage of the Secretariat of State for Arts and Letters’. Isn’t the cover handsome, illegible colour scheme and all? I just found this very good copy; now I’m missing only Vol.IV, ‘La musique et l’Eglise’.

Vol.I, ‘La musique et les salons’, with a violin concerto by Leclair and sonatas by Francoeur and Blavet, played by Charles Cyroulnik with Charbonnier and Maurice Hewitt and his Chamber Orchestra, has been transferred to CD by the excellent French label Forgotten Records. Otherwise I’d have done it. You can never have too much of all of these three composers.

Unfortunately, I know nothing about Marcelle Charbonnier, except that I like her playing very much. In her hands, the Chacone [sic] of Marchand’s first book is especially majestic and moving. Please feel free to point me to a biography or obituary. And to tell me what she was playing on – the LP doesn’t say but, again, I like it. I’ve no idea why the first book was mastered louder than the second; I’ve left the relative levels as they were.

Here are the LP’s title listings and English sleeve notes:

LOUIS MARCHAND 1669-1732

PIÈCES POUR CLAVECIN
LIVRE PREMIER (1702)
Prélude • Allemande • Premiere Courante • Deuxième Courante • Sarabande • Gigue • Chacone • Gavotte en rondeau • Menuet

LIVRE SECOND (1703)
Prélude • Allemande • Courante • Sarabande • Gigue • Gavotte • Menuet • Menuet en rondeau

‘The most illustrious keyboard virtuoso of his day, Louis Marchand was born in Lyons, France in 1669. At the age of fourteen, he was already a more accomplished musician than his father, a famous organist in Lyons. After working in Nevers and Auxerre, he came to Paris in 1689 and was appointed organist at the College des Jésuites (now the Lycée Louis-le-Grand) on the Rue Saint-Jacques. His reputation was so great that he was asked to become the organist at three others [sic, bless] churches. Finally, in 1706 he was called to the Royal Chapel at Versailles.

‘In 1714, after some unpleasantness with his wife, who had his salary confiscated [so unlike Madame Grumpy!], he left France for a concert-tour in Germany. He met Bach in Dresden, but did not dare compete with him. Bach, however, esteemed Marchand highly and made copies of some of his works.

‘He returned to Paris in 1716 and became organist at the Chapelle des Cordeliers. He remained at this post until his death in 1732 although he never accepted pay for his work there, living entirely on the proceeds of his concerts and his teaching activities.

‘In 1702 and 1703 he had published his harpsichord pieces, which show some influence of Chambonnières. They are brilliantly and elegantly written, but perhaps Marchand used them merely as frameworks for his remarkable improvisations.’

(Each book consists of a single suite; the LP’s German text says the first is in D, the second in C. Modern reference works seem to date them both to 1702.)

LOUIS-NICOLAS CLÉRAMBAULT
1679-1749

PIÈCES POUR CLAVECIN
SUITE EN UT MAJEUR (1704)
Prélude • Allemande • Courante • Première sarabande •
Deuxième sarabande • Gavotte • Gigue • Premier menuet• Deuxième menuet

SUITE EN UT MINEUR (1710?)
Prélude • Allemande • Courante • Sarabande • Gigue

“The famous Clérambault found melodies and expressions which were completely new and which cause him to be considered the one, true model.” Thus one of Clérambault's contemporaries judged this composer, while another made these comments: “Clérambault's health was not strong, but he was lively and playful in character. His talent was not obscured by caprice. He was a good father, a good husband, a good friend.”

‘Clérambault, whose father was one of the King's Twenty-Four Violins, had an early start in music. He was made organist first at Saint Jacques in Paris and, later, simultaneously at Saint-Louis de Saint-Cyr and Saint-Sulpice, as well “Surintendant” for Madame de Maintenon.

‘Besides a book of pieces for harpsichord, he left one for organ, some French cantatas, and some sonatas which show the influence of Corelli, whose music was so fashionable in the last decades of the seventeenth century.

‘The two Harpsichord Suites recorded here are subtly charming and show the great mastery attained by their composer. The Preludes are still in the style of notation used by Louis Couperin (that is, the[re] are no definite time-values assigned to the notes). It is interesting that in those pieces showing the most advanced stylization of the original dance-forms, Clérambault made frequent use of odd-numbered, unsymmetrical periods, as for example in the two Allemandes, the Courantes, and the Gigue of the Second Suite.’

(Again, modern sources date Clérambault’s Premier livre de pièces de clavecin to 1704 – no idea why Philips put 1710, which is the date of his Livre d’orgue. You can download the original 1704 edition from IMSLP. The second suite is oddly laid out.)

Each Suite is a single, fully-tagged mono FLAC file. All four are wrapped up in a single .rar archive, which you can download here.

I’ve also been grumpy because I bought some interesting old baroque LPs from a dealer in the US, some of which turned out to be fake stereo and others to be too dirty even for Grumpy, so I won’t foist them on you. I’m on the hunt for the mono originals. But there is other good stuff lying around here, which I hope to share with you (I even know where it is, since I had a bit of a tidy).

This is partly for a harpsichordist friend. No idea if he’ll like it.

The Kindness of Strangers, Part 10

Miriam Escofet, Olive Tree II, 2009
gouache on paper, 50 x 60 cm

Actually, not strangers but the parents of my dear friend, the artist Miriam Escofet. Kindness, though, definitely: recently Mr. and Mrs. Escofet gave me several old LPs they have no space for. The very first one I listened to when I got home pleased me so  much, I’m sharing it here.

Johann Kuhnau Musical Representation
of some Biblical Stories (1700) –
I ‘The Combat Between David and Goliath’,
IV ‘Hezekiah Mortally Ill and Restored to Health’,
III ‘The Marriage of Jacob’

Fritz Neumeyer (harpsichord),
Fritz Uhlenbruch (narrator)
Archiv APM 14 026, rec. 15 & 16-Oct-53

The cover is printed in Spanish because Mr. Escofet bought the LP in his native Catalunya, before he and his family left for Britain in the late 1970s. I found his LP collection most interesting, ranging from medieval music (I took quite a bit) to jazz (sorry, not my thing). His daughter Miriam remembers the house always being filled with interesting and enchanting sounds – a bit like the Cave, perhaps, only less dark, tidier and sweeter-smelling, I’m sure.

José Escofet, Harvest [detail], 1997
oil on canvas on panel, 96 x 122 cm

One reason I decided to share this Kuhnau LP is that, even though I like his vocal concertos, I’ve never enjoyed the Biblical Sonatas until now – if you’ve had the same difficulty, I hope this helps! I dutifully listened again to the better-known versions by Gustav Leonhardt, which are about as much fun as Sunday with Edmund Gosse’s father. Leonhardt reads, as far as I can tell, all of Kuhnau’s interminable narration – whatever his other talents, this ain’t his Fach (or indeed his native language). Uhlenbruch seems to have been a musicologist rather than an actor but, wisely, he cuts to the chase; and I like his archaic German and odd phonology (didn’t they pronounce umlauts in 1700?). Leonhardt occasionally speaks over Kuhnau’s music: bad, bad idea. And his narration is recorded somewhat off-mic, in a slightly reverberant acoustic, which robs it of immediacy and involvement.

Leonhardt plays the Fourth Sonata, about Hezekiah’s illness, on an organ, which goes well with Kuhnau’s use of the ‘Passion’ chorale, here titled ‘Ach Herr, mich armen Sünder’. He also chooses the organ for the First Sonata, about David and Goliath; but it’s a rather polite one and Neumeyer’s beefy but colourful Neupert harpsichord blows it away, especially at the start, when Kuhnau depicts Goliath’s blustering challenges to the Israelites (‘pochen und trotzen’).  A review of the Archiv disc in the November 1963 Gramophone is mostly and rightly favourable. It also states that it had been available for some time, on another label – that last bit seems unlikely, but maybe someone can confirm or scotch this?

The LP itself was in pretty good condition, despite some deposits of gunge from the cheapo polythene inner which seems to have been standard with Spanish LPs; I’ve only done the usual Brian Davies. I had to go easy on the narration – speech does not take aggressive de-clicking well – and what sounds like some groove-wear remains. There was no index card in the sleeve, so I can’t reproduce the texts, which would probably have been in Spanish anyway. I’m sure you can find them somewhere on the web? The stories are from I Samuel 17:1-58 & 18:1-8; II Kings 20:1-19 plus Isaiah 38:1-22; and Genesis 19. Apparently.

Three mono FLAC files, fully tagged, in a .rar file here.

José Escofet, Forbidden Fruit [detail], 2009
oil on canvas, 85 x 74 cm

José Escofet and his daughter Miriam are both artists and they have kindly allowed me to post some of their work here. There is more on their websites, which I urge you to visit (links above). They draw on the same kind of long, deep tradition, rich in memory and meaning, to which Kuhnau contributed. I am lucky to know them and Mrs. Escofet, too, who also trained as an artist and is no less remarkable and generous than the rest of her family.

Miriam Escofet, José Escofet, 2007
oil on canvas on board,  50 x 40 cm
Selected for the BP Portrait Award 2007 exhibition
at the National Portrait Gallery, London

Screwier than Archimedes

Anon. and Sermisy arr. Attaingnant and Gervaise
Chambonnières, Daquin, Grigny,
Dandrieu, Rameau, Balbastre
Claude Jean Chiasson
(harpsichord by Chiasson, after classical models)
Lyrichord LL 19 (recorded 1951?, New York?)

‘Displacement!’ - just to remember the word, I had to get out of the Cave and go to the supermarket, that’s how addle-pated I am these days. I should have been working on the thesis – instead, I spent much of today cleaning up this beautifully preserved 1951 LP and trying to identify the contents.

I haven’t succeeded in all cases. Except for ‘Tant que vivray’, which any fule kno is by Sermisy, I didn’t try to pin down the pieces arranged by Attaingnant and Gervaise, as they published so many. Though I’m not sure which of Attaingnant’s three versions of Sermisy’s chanson this is. Nor could I place Daquin’s La Mélodieuse, as I didn’t find a listing of his many pièces de clavecin. If you can help, that would be grand. The first Gervaise piece should be easy, it’s so familiar. Everything else I managed to nail. Quite proud of finding the Dialogue by Grigny, one of two organ pieces here – the other is Balbastre’s noël ‘Joseph est bien marié’.

This is not the sort of harpsichord recital you could buy nowadays – far too eclectic and wide-ranging. Here’s what Chiasson himself wrote on the sleeve:

‘The reign of the harpsichord coincides with the period of France as a great nation, and of Paris as the artistic center of Europe [so it went south after 1791! Attaboy!]. With the advent of François I to the throne in 1515, the Renaissance of the arts in France was in full swing. Paris in the Sixteenth Century became the world center of music printing and publishing, ranking well above Lyons, Amsterdam and Nuremberg. The main publishers of music were Ballard, Le Roy and Atteignant, who between the years 1530 and 1549 produced many beautifully designed volumes of chansons, madrigals, instrumental pieces and keyboard works.

‘From the point of view of the performing artist, great research is necessary in the study of the old "Danseries" before determining the correct notes to be played, not to mention the problems of phrasing, tempo, and the general spirit of these little masterpieces. Sharps and flats are frequently missing, and enormous care must go into deciding where they should be added. The cold matter of the mere printed notes must be warmed, infused with breath, life and color, by the individual interpreter. It is precisely this open, free quality which makes this music such a joy to prepare.

‘It would be impossible in a single program to give a comprehensive idea of the rich mine of harpsichord music bequeathed to us by the great composers of three centuries. The program-builder is confronted with such a bewildering array of masterpieces, such a diversity of styles, that to select a general group to fit into the time limits of an LP recording is a difficult matter indeed. The present program was designed to cover the ground in as balanced a way as possible.’

Chiasson did a fine job, recording several pieces which are still not often heard today. One thing I specially like is that he segues many of the pieces, even those by different composers, as if playing this programme through in one sweep (maybe he did?), so that I had to start some tracks right up against the music and leave other items yoked together.

I also like his gutsy gusto in the Renaissance danseries, though maybe ‘Tant que vivray’ lacks a little lyricism. He’s pensive in the lovely Chaconne by Chambonnières, grand in Rameau’s unmeasured Prélude in a minor and tender in some of the more delicate, quintessentially French rondeaux (again, Chambonnières’ is a winner). Occasionally he’s a little rhythmically routine and four-square, a common trait in the age of the ‘sewing-machine’ style; and trills can be a tad shapeless. But there are breath, life and color here aplenty.

Here’s what the sleeve said about Chiasson: ‘Pianist, organist, harpsichordist and scholar, Claude Jean Chiasson has devoted many years to the interpretation of early keyboard music, especially of France. In addition to his multiple musical activities, which include extensive concert tours, Mr. Chiasson has for the past twenty years been active in the reconstruction of the harpsichord, refining and modifying his designs after the great school of the Ruckers, Couchet and Taskin. The instrument used for this recording represents the finest example to come from his workshop. At one time director of the Sunday Concerts for the Fine Arts Museum in Boston, Mr. Chiasson now makes his home in New York City and divides his time between concert tours and the building of harpsichords.’

Yes, the 1950s weren’t all Cage and Kerouac.

The recording is a little bright and brash. I’ve done nothing beyond the usual ClickRepair (nowadays, I also do basic low-frequency denoising) and some detailed retouching.

Thirteen mono, fully-tagged FLACs in a .rar file here.

It could have been worse – I could have spent the time moving LPs from one stalagmite to another. Or washing pants.