Forgive them, Father, for they have not a clue…

A corner of the Cave
(snapped by Grumpy, with his lovely new lens…)

William Byrd
Music from the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book
Fritz Neumeyer (harpsichord)
Archiv 13 026 AP (rec. 24 & 25 May 1954)

Once again, many apologies for my long silence. I’ve been finishing a certain pressing task – which, I’m glad to say, is finally done: last week, I sent off my thesis to be printed and bound, for submission to the examiners. They now have 8 weeks, poor chaps, to read all >ahem!< 86,184 words (not including footnotes or appendices)…

While I was desperately trying to focus my thoughts, I found myself craving mostly modern music: Birtwistle, Berio, Boulez, Dufourt, Grisey, Haas, Ligeti, Stockhausen, and I forget who else… plus a lot of Stravinsky, as ever: I finally learned to love his Concertino, for instance, thanks to a cracking DG disc of his shorter pieces, superbly performed by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.

We also spent two weeks in New York, where we witnessed Hurricane Sandy, and I was lucky enough to meet fellow-blogger Squirrel. He and his marvellous mate received me most hospitably, plying me with tea and delicious home-baked cookies. Their Nest is in a fascinating neighbourhood, which Squirrel guided me round most informatively. Then we went to a concert of Scottish and English viol music and songs, ravishingly performed by New York-based viol consort Parthenia, with the counter-tenor Ryland Angel. I see they’re repeating it this coming Tuesday (14 January) in Greenwich Village, at St. Luke in the Fields, 487 Hudson Street – do go if you can!

So, no time for LP transfers (though I’ve been buying 78s aplenty). Also, my ‘main’ PC suddenly died, disrupting my audio workflow; and my new hobby (photography – bad, for a spendthrift like me) demands that I invest in some new hardware, for digital image-processing. So I’ve  got to do some techy research before I take the plunge. One thing I can tell you right now, though, and for free: I’m not touching Windows 8.

Still, I have some transfers on the stocks, so, in homage to Squirrel and Parthenia, here’s one to tide us over until I get back into those grooves. (Also, we’re away in New Zealand until early February.) Not the greatest harpsichord playing, but it is one of the earliest LPs devoted entirely to Byrd’s keyboard music I know of. The best performance here, for me, is of The Bells.

1 Praeludium to the Fancie [BK12]; Fantasia [BK13]
2 Fortune My Foe, Farewell Delight [BK6]
3 The Bells [BK38]
4 The Third Pavian [BK14]
5 Galliard in D 'Sol Re' [BK53]
6 An Almane [BK89]
7 La Volta [BK91]

The 7 mono, fully tagged FLAC files are in a .rar archive, here.

So what’s with the the title of this post? Well, a kind visitor to the Cave just alerted me to the fact that another harpsichord LP, of the same vintage (Jean-Claude Chiasson playing Couperin on Lyrichord), has become the first of Grumpy’s droppings to fall foul of the censors: it is now marked ‘©  This file is copyrighted and cannot be shared’. They’re wrong, actually, but never mind.

The large record companies have lost the plot so completely, that I’m almost past caring. Though it made me very cross when I saw an upload by Discobole, of orchestral music by Chabrier conducted by Jean Fournet – in 1952, for goodness’ sake –, blocked with the message,
‘Permission Denied. Not provided by submitter by Not provided by submitter can be downloaded from one of these fine retailers.’
I can’t work out if the lack of a modern commercially available alternative was down to the ignorance of the sad snitch who grassed Discobole up, or of the company which supposedly ‘owns’ Fournet’s recording (it doesn’t: the LP entered the public domain about ten years ago, which is why Naxos has been able to reissue it).

Something similar happened to an upload by Damian, of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite and Serenade conducted by Franz André, but that time the message was along the lines of, ‘Buy this from Orinoco, played by the False Claims Orchestra on the Lobbyist label’. I have absolutely no time for piracy but this is not it. The sheer bad faith and idiocy of this procedure are breath-taking. Grumpy is getting grumpier by the hour.

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

Farmer Grumpy says, ‘Get orff moy paast!’

Mozart Sonata in A K.311
Fritz Neumeyer
(fortepiano by Johann Gottlieb Fichtl, late 18th C)
Archiv AP 13013 (rec. 30 October 1952)

Apologies for my long, rude silence and a big thank you to everyone who has read this blog and left kind comments. Blogger has been broken for some time and I am tired of dealing with the pointless ‘improvements’ to technology which I had been happily using for months without problems. I hope to respond soon. The good news is, I have been writing my PhD! Slowly, but surely…

Still, I am known to slink naughtily off for some retail therapy. Yesterday, my bad friend Jolyon and I went to visit a kind man who sold us some interesting 78s and LPs from his gargantuan collection – like me, he can’t bear to see anything thrown away.

Among them were some LPs formerly in the library of a British university music department, which was notoriously closed down a few years ago. I was very glad to find this one, which I’m fairly sure is one of the earliest complete recordings of a Classical keyboard sonata on a fortepiano. Ralph Kirkpatrick was making records on one around this time, although I believe that was a modern instrument by John Challis. If you know of earlier or other contemporary recordings, I’d be very interested to learn of them.

I knew of this disc but had never seen nor heard it. Nor would you, if it was up to the record industry’s ‘To-infinity-and-beyond!’ copyright-extension lobby and its superannuated self-appointed terrors of the newsgroups, to the early music thought-police or to keyboard-lion worshippers and Martha Argerich scrapbook compilers. (NB I specifically exclude DG from this list of villains; I very much doubt they could sell this disc at a profit, precisely because of all the other people who would immediately tell us it’s worthless.)

Another reason is that this LP was apparently roundly condemned when first issued in Britain – unfortunately, the January 1955 issue of Gramophone is one of several missing entirely from the magazine’s archive, although the scathing review was cited (approvingly) when a 12-inch LP reissue was covered in November 1963.

No, it’s not the greatest performance ever recorded. But who is to tell us which is? Who is to dictate to us that we should never hear it again? That we should not try to appreciate the pioneering efforts of artists like Neumeyer? Are all today’s fortepianists really that much better? I think Neumeyer is rather sensitive and poetic in the first two movements. And good on him for going for broke in the finale – Turkish music was meant to be a bit kitsch, I suspect. Also, recordings of instruments by this Viennese maker are none too common.

Get the three fully tagged, mono FLAC files in a .rar file here.

Yes, like Farmer Palmer, when I see someone braying ‘deservedly forgotten’ and worriting moy sheep, I reach for my 12-bore…