Delman and boys

 

Michael Haydn Missa Sancti Aloysii in Bb MH 257
J.S. Bach Weichet nur betrübte Schatten BWV 202
Jacqueline Delman, Emerentia Scheepers (sopranos)
Kathleen Joyce (contralto)
Hampstead Parish Church Boys’ Choir
Martindale Sidwell (chorus master, organ)
London Baroque Orchestra
Karl Haas (conductor)
Recorded 14 & 15 December 1953, issued late 1954
Parlophone PMA 1023

I’m happy to announce that since my last post I’ve uploaded four more LP transfers to my Internet Archive account, starting with the above four months ago (sorry). It’s a lovely record, which I originally transferred for the sakes of Bach’s beautiful ‘Wedding Cantata’, and of Karl Haas, whom I admire. The Bach side was in good condition and didn’t need too much work but the other, with Michael Haydn’s Mass, had endless little plops and scuffs and took ages. Still, as I restored it I came to enjoy both music and performance more and more, so that’s a win!

And it’s another black mark for EMI and its ‘successors’, who for the last half-century have sat on almost all of the many pioneering and enjoyable recordings of Karl Haas and his excellent London Baroque Ensemble, stuffed with top-flight British players of the 1950s and 1960s. Only the Phoenixa CD reissue series, short-lived as it was (and clearly unloved by EMI), and Testament have allowed us to hear how good these recordings are when remastered from master tapes and not from house clearance castoffs.

Talking of Testament, everyone who cares about historical recordings of classical music, as well as about intelligent A&R and marketing, will have mourned the recent and all too premature death of Testament’s founder and head, Stewart Brown. I knew Stewart a little and he was always friendly, helpful, positive, unpretentious and deeply savvy, with a winning touch of Trotter about him (which it seems you need, if you’re to succeed in that line of business). His label was and remains a leader in the field, with remastering from the best available sources (for commercial LPs, usually master tapes, doggedly licensed) and exemplary presentation. Long may it flourish.

So, if it’s not too impertinent from one unfit to unlatch his sandals, I dedicate this post to Stewart’s memory, in the hope that his taste, entrepreneurship, dedication to music, and knowledge of catalogues and his customers’ wants, will continue to show up the dog-in-the-mangerishness of multinational catalogue-hoarders.

Talking of dogs in mangers… watch out for another post on that subject!

For now, just a quick reminder that my Internet Archive account is here, and that the other new LP transfers now up are of Fela Sowande’s lilting African Suite for strings and harp, in Trevor Harvey’s 1951-ish Decca recording; four Handel trio sonatas, recorded around the same time for Urania by the husband-and-wife team of Mr. and Mrs. Willy Schweyda; and another Urania LP from a couple of years later, of quartets by Boccherini, de Giardini and Puccini, played by the Quartetto della Scala of Milan.

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!)

Une poignée de Pougnet

Beethoven String Trio in E flat Op.3
Jean Pougnet (violin)
Frederick Riddle (viola)
Anthony Pini (cello)
rec. 12 to 18 September 1952, Konzerthaus(?), Vienna
by Westminster (USA)
transfer from 1964 UK issue on HMV CLP 1765

Beethoven String Trios in G Op.9 No.1 & D Op.9 No.2
Jean Pougnet (violin)
Frederick Riddle (viola)
Anthony Pini (cello)
rec. 12 to 18 September 1952, Konzerthaus(?), Vienna
by Westminster (USA)
transfer from 1964 UK issue on HMV CLP 1775

Beethoven String Trios in c minor Op.9 No.3
& in D Op.8 ‘Serenade’
Jean Pougnet (violin)
Frederick Riddle (viola)
Anthony Pini (cello)
rec. 12 to 18 September 1952, Konzerthaus(?), Vienna
by Westminster (USA)
transfer from 1964 UK issue on HMV CLP 1785

While I was at it, I thought I should share these other recordings by Pougnet, Riddle and Pini. I really enjoy these works, in which Beethoven is clearly flexing his muscles as a composer of weighty but playful and varied chamber music for strings – before tackling the biggie… And I love these recordings, as I do this group’s Divertimento K.563 of Mozart, which I shared in my last post, and which must have been a stimulus for Beethoven’s Op.3 and the model for Op.8.

Not much more to say, except to say that I feel Westminster’s excellent 1952 recordings (complete with… Viennese tram rumble?) have again come up well in these transfers from 1964 HMV issues. I wonder why EMI licensed them that latet?) They were only available for a very short time – deleted by the end of 1966 – so they’re not that common. I don’t think the first two LPs come from my late father’s collection – I must have got them second-hand. The third, I borrowed from a library, but I couldn’t then scan or photograph the sleeve; I’ve since acquired one of the Westminster issues, so I’ve included images of its sleeve and labels:

I didn’t photograph the HMV labels, as the inner sleeves have opaque paper liners (good choice!), and I don’t have a clean horizontal surface to photograph disc labels on (you do know the Cave is more of a tip than ever, don’t you? I’m losing my grip – no, make that: I’ve  lost it…).

So, to download these LPs, as fully tagged mono FLACs plus images, in Zip files, follow these links:

HMV CLP 1765 Op.3

HMV CLP 1775 Op.9 Nos.1-2

HMV CLP 1785 Op.9 No.3, Op.8

There’s plenty of information about the works on the interwebs and in the sleeve notes which I’ve also included in the Zip files, such as this wonkily glued one:

A quick look at previous recordings of these still somewhat overlooked works:

Op.3:
no version on 78s
first recorded c.1951, Pasquier Trio, Allegro

Op.8:
first recorded 1934, Szymon Goldberg, Paul Hindemith & Emanuel Feuermann, Columbia UK, also issued in US & elsewhere
1936, Pasquier Trio, Pathé; issued in US and UK on Columbia
1950, Joseph & Lillian Fuchs, Leonard Rose, US Decca LP
1951, Erich Röhn, Reinhard Wolf, Arthur Troester, DGG, variable micrograde 78 + LP
c.1951(?), Trio à cordes de la Garde Républicaine, Saturne picture-disc 78
c.1951, Pasquier Trio, Allegro (with Op.9 No.1)

Op.9 No.1:
first recorded 1938, Pasquier Trio, Pathé; issued in US and UK on Columbia
c.1939?, Mara Sebriansky, Edward & George Neikrug, Musicraft
c.1951, Pasquier Trio, Allegro (with Op.8)
18 September 1952, Bel Arte Trio, US Decca LP (with Op.9 No.2)

Op.9 No.2:
first recorded 1949, Pasquier Trio, L’Anthologie Sonore 78 + LP
c.1951, Pasquier Trio, Allegro (with Op.9 No.3)
18 September 1952, Bel Arte Trio, US Decca LP (with Op.9 No.1)

Op.9 No.3:
first recorded March 1934, Trio de Bruxelles, Columbia France; also issued in UK
April 1934, Pasquier Trio, Pathé; issued in US and UK on Columbia
1950, Joseph, Lillian & Harry Fuchs, Decca US LP (with Joseph & Lillian Fuchs, Julius Baker, Serenade in D Op.25)
c.1951, Pasquier Trio, Allegro (with Op.9 No.2)

Let me know if I’ve missed any!

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.

One out, Ten in

Vivaldi 6 Concertos for flute, strings & b.c. Op.10
Jean-Pierre Rampal (flute),
Robert Veyron-Lacroix (harpsichord),
Louis de Froment Instrumental Ensemble
Felsted L 89003
(rec. 1953/54?, Paris?, issued September 1954)

It’s no good – much as I try to declutter the Cave, which is mainly what’s kept me from here (once again, many apologies), more floods in. I’ve not been ruthless enough – after several trips to the dump, there are still piles of ancient hi-fi and computer bits, books I’ve not looked at in 30 years, endless runs of magazines… And, of course, for every disc that goes out, an order of magnitude more comes in. But La Grumpy is pleased with my progress. And she has always generously indulged my endless purchases and acquisitions, such as this nice and little-known LP, bought recently from France.

Stuff does go out. For several years I’ve been selling surplus CDs online – a couple a month, usually (often, not even that many). That’s far too slow to make a dent in the Cave, so I’ve started giving discs (78s and LPs too) to our national sound archive. Some people will be surprised to learn that it doesn’t already ‘have everything’. It receives some new releases, yes, from some record companies, as voluntary donations; but many, it has to buy, since Britain has no statutory legal deposit of audio-visual material, unlike printed material. This was one of the subjects discussed on Friday 21st March at Keeping Tracks, a symposium on ‘music and archives in the digital age’ organized by the British Library in London. One presentation, by Trond Valberg and Lars Gaustad of Norway’s National Library, left us all green. Get this: they not only do have statutory legal deposit of audio-visual material, they also receive original master recordings from record companies!

What’s that got to do with this post? Well, I’d much rather you could enjoy this LP remastered from the original tape than from my pre-loved pressing, even though it has come up pretty well, thanks (as ever) to Brian Davies’ marvellous software. What are companies like Universal, Sony or Warner – none of which attended the symposium or, I gather, have bothered to respond to the British Library’s overtures about digital archiving – going to do with material which they’re unlikely ever to remaster digitally and sell? Does anyone at Universal, which now owns Decca, publisher of this LP, know about it or where the master tape is?

In fact, who recorded the master? In August 1954, The Gramophone reported the launch of Felsted, a subsidiary label of Decca carrying material licensed from France and falling into three categories, ‘Serious, Jazz and Swing and Authentic Dance Rhythms… The serious music… will feature both Classical and Modern music.’ Felsted lasted into the 1960s but its programme of ‘Serious’ music soon fizzled out, amounting to just seven 12-inch LPs and one 10-inch. I’ve only come across three or four for sale, of which I’ve managed to buy this and one other (I was outbid on a third).

Felsted masters were apparently licensed from the French label Classic. Rampal certainly recorded for Classic: I own a 78 of Bach’s solo Partita BWV 1013 played by him, which I plan to transfer and share once I get the Cave wired for 78 playback; and I’m sure that the famous Pierrot lunaire, in which he plays under René Leibowitz, must have been recorded by Classic, as were Berg’s Chamber Concerto, also conducted by Leibowitz (both can now be heard on a Japanese Green Door CD), and other works of the Second Viennese School.

Thing is, I’ve found no Classic issue of this Vivaldi Op.10 LP – although it has been confused with a slightly later Vox recording by Rampal and Froment, which was reissued by Tecval on a budget Tuxedo Music CD. And no Classic issue of Pierrot seems to be documented, either. Who now owns the Classic catalogue, anyway, which is stuffed of fascinating and important, pioneering recordings (we need a Classic discography)? It could be Universal Music France – but then you might expect this to have turned up in Accord’s 8-CD box of early concerto recordings by Rampal (get it and its companion chamber music box – they’re both fabulous). Maybe no one owns it… In which case, could Decca here in Britain be sitting on the only reliably locatable (copy) master tape?

Sorry, I’ve been rabbiting on, and it’s time to cut to the recording itself (6 fully tagged mono FLACs, in a .rar file, here). As soon as I put it on, I knew it was a good ’un, despite the technical problems. These include very audible pre-echo, edits, drop-outs (of which the worst is at 2:21-ish in Concerto No.2) and a high hum. The second movement of Concerto No.6 has been scalped (4:05); and the balance is unrealistic, with the flute close enough for us to hear a lot of key-work and pad-smacks - and the harpsichord’s even closer. I’m too lazy to download the score but I’m sure I hear misreadings here and there (at 4:27 in No.2, is that really the right note at the top of the upward phrase?); and in places Veyron-Lacroix slightly over-elaborates the continuo, at one point adding Dart-like canonic responses to the flute part.

[For some reason, the sleeve bills Concerto No.3,
‘Il Cardellino’ (or ‘Gardellino’, ‘The Goldfinch’),
as being in G, when it’s in D – isn’t it?]

But the vitality and freshness (and, in No.5, tender delicacy) of everyone’s playing more than make up for all that. And I like being able to hear Rampal clearly, since his virtuosity is so breath-taking, debonair and well suited to the music. In October 1954, The Gramophone rightly praised Rampal but was a little sniffy about the ensemble’s ‘stinginess in numbers’ and ‘prosaic … style’ (incidentally, why was de Froment not credited as conductor? Maybe he didn’t?). To me, now, the ensemble’s small size and ‘prosaic’ playing sound prophetic, a reminder that performance practices varied more in the past than melioristic accounts of the 1970s & ’80s baroque boom would have us believe. And we can only know that by hearing these old records.

So: national libraries of the world, unite and dig this stuff out from under the dogs in the mangers; you have nothing to lose but simplistic conceptions of the past. I’m not suggesting that record company archives should be expropriated. But what if, instead of collecting mainly pressed discs (test and published), national libraries and archives were allowed to remaster the unloved, forgotten productions of their countries’ record labels, so that music-loving readers, researchers and discographers could enjoy them (only in reading rooms or on the institutions’  intranets) free of the dirt and damage of decades, in sound which does justice to their often surprising and delightful contents?

Oh, and I almost forgot – this was the first complete recording of Op.10 and it includes the first recordings I can trace of No.2 and No.6.

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

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.

Le retour de Madame Guerre… plus Grumpy

Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre
(Not) Complete Harpsichord Works
Louis-Nicolas Clérambault
Premier livre de pièces de clavecin, 1704
Thurston Dart (harpsichord by Thomas Goff)
L’Oiseau-Lyre  OL 50183 (p. 1959)

Once again, apologies for the long silence. Good news: I’ve more or less finished the thesis! It means I can at last bring you some of the many intriguing LPs I’ve bought recently. I’m also itching to transfer several rare and fascinating 78s. But they’ll have to wait until I hook up the varispeed turntable, buy some suitable styli and a proper pre-amp and, most importantly, a record-washing machine. A couple of LPs have proved too grubby even for Grumpy and will need the kind of treatment Matron used to mete out to us after games.

But I knew very quickly this’d be a good ’un – and so it is, except for one very odd fault and another not so odd. As the Gramophone reviewer put it: ‘The record is unfortunately marred by a persistent technical fault—a kind of rumbling or roaring noise which is only too audible through the delicate sounds of the harpsichord. I am inclined to think that this is caused not by some external nuisance such as traffic, but by some mechanical or electronic failing in the recording equipment used.’

Actually, it only mars about 4 minutes of one suite; but another is afflicted with a different and deliberate defect. More on both problems below. Otherwise, the recording is close but not oppressive, crisp and clear. In fact it mirrors the playing of Thurston Dart and admirably suits his instrument. Mind you, good though Dart is, there’s a slight feeling of him translating a foreign idiom, although he manages some lilting notes inégales. He does a of lot of colouring-in with stops; and he betrays a hint of the 1950s ‘sewing-machine’ aesthetic in the often unrelenting way he zips through phrases and paragraphs.

I was a bit unfair in my title listing: this LP was issued in 1959, well before Mme Jacquet de la Guerre’s first keyboard book, of four suites, was rediscovered in the 1980s. The fifth and sixth suites here make up her Pièces de clavecin qui peuvent se jouer sur le viollon (1707). The first is in d minor and was recorded by Dart in this order: La Flamande (with Double)—Courante (with Double)—Rigaudons I & II—Gigues I (with Double) & II—Chaconne. The second suite, in G major, is more conventionally laid out: Allemande—Courante—Sarabande—Menuet—Rondeau. It’s inventive, striking, instantly memorable music, which I’ve enjoyed several times while getting this transfer ready.

At first, I thought Clérambault was prettier and slighter but he’s grown on me, with some notably expressive moments.  The grave, unmeasured preludes of each suite are especially fine, and well handled by Dart, though one minuet gets too jaunty for Grumpy. The first suite is in C major: Prélude—Allemande (with Double)—Courante—Sarabandes I & II—Gavotte (with Double)—Gigue—Menuets I & II (en rondeau). The second suite is in c minor: Prélude—Allemande—Courante—Sarabande—Gigue. The Allemande is superb, gruffly eloquent in Dart’s well-chosen registration, if a little stiff, but just what this repertoire is all about.

How remarkable that the long tradition of the clavecinistes, which I can imagine at first seems either arid, desiccated, formal, hermetic and frenchified, or pretty, precious, repetitious, inconsequential and … frenchified, is in fact so varied, personal and rewarding.  (I use ‘frenchified’ as an imaginary term of chauvinistic abuse, uttered by an 18th Century British philistine. But there are plenty of 21st Century British philistines.)

But be prepared for a rude shock in the Allemande of Jacquet de la Guerre’s suite in G. To simulate a piano repeat of the opening section, the engineer cranked the level back, a cheat they were wont to use in the 1950s. Something similar but less extreme seems to happen in the Sarabande, too. That’s nothing compared to what afflicts Clérambault’s first suite: from 3:25, some sort of electronic induction sets off a low, wandering buzz, which maunders on, like a dyspeptic theremin at Dart’s elbow, for 4 minutes and 8 seconds. It’s less noticeable on speakers than on headphones. My good friend Jolyon gallantly removed as much of it as he could but, being the ingrate that I am, I present it here untreated – except for the usual light Daviesification (o, bless his name!) (and Jolyon’s).

Download Jacquet de la Guerre’s suites as two mono, fully tagged FLACs in a .rar here.

Download Clérambault’s suites as two mono, fully tagged FLACs in a .rar here.