A Dilemma and a Freebie

Deepest apologies for my long absence! I've been doing paid work, now that I'm in the 4th (and, let's hope, final) year of my PhD and no longer have a stipend...

First, the freebie: pursuing my grumpily unfashionable theme of unloved early music records, here is the Quartetto Italiano (Paolo Borciani and Elisa Pegreffi, violins; Piero Farulli, viola; Franco Rossi, cello) playing Italian mid-Baroque 4-part sonatas - or, as the lovely Columbia sleeve has it:

Class, eh?And yet - not one of the Quartetto's best albums, to be honest. Still, I think it's well worth hearing - this is a wonderful repertoire, which I've been collecting and enjoying on CD for years, and now I'm often finding that musicians of the 1950s and even earlier made some very honourable stabs at it.

Of special interest, as noted by J.N. (Jeremy Noble?) in The Gramophone (May 1957, pp.453-54), is the way 'the Quartetto Italiano have made a gesture towards authenticity by abjuring vibrato in the earliest pieces' - so, yar boo sucks to all those who imagine such devices were only thought of in the 1970s. The rest of this review strikes me as a tad churlish, which can't have helped this LP to sell; in his haste to point out that these are not really string quartets and mostly have a continuo part, the writer forgot that modern string quartets (notably André Mangeot's various formations) had been playing 16th, 17th and 18th C string consorts for more than half a century - and why the hell not!? No string quartet today will start a programme with Gabrieli, Marini or Vivaldi - and we're the poorer for it. Even the Pro Arte Quartet recorded a Vivaldi concerto (DB 2148, 1933 - never reissued - and, again, why the hell not!?) and if he was good enough for them...

So, 7 mono FLAC files at

http://www.mediafire.com/file/yymhwqwnyzy/Columbia_33CX_1430.rar

I've tried to identify all the pieces but I got lazy with Vitali's Capriccio - if anyone can pin-point that (or confirm that this is Neri's Sonata quinta from Op.2*) I'll be... less grumpy than usual. Michael Gray's data (http://www.charm.kcl.ac.uk/) gives a recording date only for the items on side 1 (and the Italian LP number); I've assumed side 2 was recorded the same day. Talking of the Italian issue, the Quartetto's own very useful website gives the date of April 1957, which must be the release date, as well as the entire original Italian sleeve note by Luigi Pestalozza. I hope you can make out Columbia's translation in my scan, and also the section titles: each piece is one file but three consist of more than one section. In fact two aren't quite right here: the Marini apparently goes (a) Entrata grave (b) Balletto allegro (c) Gagliarda (d) Corrente (e) Retirata (so my Manze CD says); and the Vivaldi should be (a) Largo molto (b) Allegro ma poco andante.

[*P.S. This has now been confirmed by the mighty Jolyon!]

The Dilemma

Should I give recordings away free? This one, yes: I've done nothing beyond the usual ClickRepair and the condition of side 2 was not quite what I was led to believe by the seller, so there's quite a bit of shushy noise in the Vitali and some clunks in the Vivaldi. (Also, are my dubs getting worse or what?) But I have a couple of other LPs of this type which are rarer and musically more rewarding. If academic work is not forthcoming after I finish my Phd (if I ever do...) and even if it is, I'd like to make a living in this reissues racket; if these guys can do it, why not me?

CHARM sound archive goes online

Send the family on holiday, clear your diary, farm out the pets, buy in plenty of tins and put the phone on divert: you will spend the next two weeks on your own, in the dark, happily hunting and listening to a treasure trove of long-forgotten goodies from the wonderful to the weird.

More than 5,000 historical recordings (each one, a side of a 10- or 12-inch coarse-groove disc), dating from about 1915 to 1952, have just been made available online for anyone to stream or download, free, anywhere in the world.

The CHARM online sound archive combines transfers made under the auspices of two academic projects: CHARM itself, the AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music, which ran from 2004 to 2009; and 'Musicians of Britain and Ireland, 1900-1950', brainchild of Professor Daniel Leech-Wilkinson of the Music Department, King's College, London, one of the Associate Directors of CHARM. Daniel brilliantly secured funding from the UK's JISC and so more than doubled the number of transfers funded under CHARM.

The transfer engineers were Andrew Hallifax, who has worked with many classical artists and companies as well as making recodings for his own record label, Big Ears; and Martin Haskell, who has worked for Decca, ASV and other companies and engineered many, many reissues of historical recordings.

The project would not have been possible without the amazing discographical research done over many decades by the likes of Frank Andrews, Michael Smith, Ernie & Ernest Bayly and Bill Dean-Myatt, all published by the CLPGS, and by Alan Kelly of Sheffield.

I must declare an interest: I ended up being the main selector of recordings to be transferred by the two projects, though others, inside CHARM and out, were also free to make suggestions; and our warmest thanks must go to the doyen of British critics of singing, John Steane, for kindly and freely giving of his fabled expertise in that domain.

You will find all the information you need about the two projects and the CHARM archive, about searching, file formats and players and so on, on the site. So:

Get searching and enjoy!

Roger Wagner directs Monteverdi Madrigals, 1951?

Hello all,

For some years now I have admired the work of choral director Roger Wagner and everything of his I hear only increases my admiration. Some time ago I posted on various newsgroups my transfer of his lovely Capitol LP of Stephen Foster songs, which I continue to enjoy and delight my friends with (now, if only I could buy the Korean EMI CD reissue or, better still, EMI would reissue more of their Roger Wagner archive in the Western hemisphere!).

Next I would like to present his Lyrichord LP of Monteverdi's first Book of Madrigals; as far as I can tell, it is a 1953 reissue of a 1951 origination on Allegro (interestingly, only Side 2 has an Allegro matrix number and sounds distinctly worse than Side 1 - lower level, more noise; they can't have re-recorded Side 1, can they?). The Allegro issue was apparently listed and/or reviewed in two American publications, The Gramophone Shop Supplement in August 1951 and Consumers' Research Bulletin in October '51, neither of which I've seen. My estimate of the recording date is based on these but it could have been earlier. According to http://therogerwagnerchorale.com/history.html the Chorale was signed to Capitol in 1949, but perhaps that contract wasn't exclusive, as I see that in 1951 Allegro brought out an LP of Bach Cantatas with the Chorale.

This Monteverdi is a bit of a 'run-through', in places (as many such traversals are), and I'm not sure all stanzas of all the poems are sung (not that I've checked) but it's an amazingly stylish, confident and pretty enjoyable presentation, sung by a small ensemble rather than the large choir one might expect to hear at this time.

It was also a time when so much early music was still presented in rag-bag anthologies from widely disparate periods and styles, so this record strikes one as a very serious enterprise. In fact, I wonder if it wasn't the first recording of a complete book of madrigals - does anyone know?

The Singers are listed on the back and include one especially interesting name - I wonder what else of this nature she sang in?:

Marni Nixon and Ewan Harbrecht (sopranos)
Katherine Hilgenberg (contralto)
Richard Robinson (tenor)
Paul Salamunovich (baritone)
Paul Hinshaw (bass)

One of my usual pretty basic transfers, using ClickRepair: 21 tagged mono FLACs, with a so-so scan of the texts on the back of the sleeve, in one .rar file which can be downloaded from Mediafire here.

Still some sonic problems, such as slight blasting on peaks towards the ends of sides and quite a bit of surface swish and swoosh. A friend told me about Waves' Z-noise gizmo and demonstrated it very convincingly on a track from my Mildred Clary lute disc. >Sigh<, another piece of software to buy! Enjoy!

Vinyl fest on Classical Collection, BBC Radio Three

Hi all,

One of the things I do to earn a crust (and keep the grumpy hormones flowing) is produce music programmes for BBC Radio Three. I work as a freelancer, employed by British independent production company Classic Arts - to whom many thanks!

The main programme I make is Classical Collection, presented alternately by pianist and teacher Sarah Walker and Gramophone Editor-in-Chief James Jolly. They're both thoroughly good eggs and I love working with them - no grounds for grumpiness there!

Each week's programmes are more or less loosely built around a theme - very far from loosely, when I choose them, as when we did 'Music Restored - Reconstructions and Completions' a couple of weeks ago and (slightly to my editor's dismay) every single piece fitted the theme. Yes, I never do things by halves.

But next week, starting at 10:00 am on Monday 25th January, is really special and unusual: all the music, with very few exceptions, comes from LPs and has never been issued on CD.

Given the rapid adoption of CD in the mid-1980s, this is surely the first time in a good two and a half decades - a generation, in fact - that this has been done for a 'routine' music sequence on Radio Three.

The few exceptions are three recordings which have been issued on CD only in Japan (in two of those cases, nearly twenty years ago); and two more which have been issued on both LP and CD, by one of my very favourite record labels, Testament (these LPs are still available).

In addition, all the recordings bar one were transferred by me, here behind the second stalagmite on the left, on my bank of grubby second-hand equipment, and all bat guano cleaned off using the wonderful ClickRepair.

The exception to that is Paul Paray's 1953 Detroit recording of Beethoven's Symphony No.7, which has recently been remastered from an original Mercury LP by Pristine Classical, to whom many thanks for providing us with FLACs!

Many of the LPs came from the BBC's large library of commercial recordings but some are my own copies, some were kindly supplied by record companies and one was lent by one of the artists, from his own collection.

Full playlists for Monday to Wednesday have been posted on Radio Three's website; Thursday and Friday should follow soon (slightly less user-friendly listings can also be found at the Radio Times website).

Of course, Classical Collection allows me to 'share' with fellow music-lovers many recordings and compositions which I could never post here, as they are still in copyright.

Among these are the Suite from Stravinsky's Pulcinella, conducted with great verve and charm by Heinrich Hollreiser on mid-'50s Vox; the Schubert Quintet in C D.956, recorded at the 1982 Lockenhaus Festival by a group including Kaja Danczowska, a Philips digital LP which I believe was never issued in the UK; and Danczowska again, playing Mozart with Krystian Zimerman, no less, on a Polish Wifon LP.





Another highlight is the estampie Chominciamento di gioia, in a fantastic early 1970s arrangement and performance by Thomas Binkley and the Studio der frühen Musik. In the mid-80s, half of the parent Telefunken LP, Musik der Spielleute, was cack-handedly and quite irrelevantly tacked onto the end of a CD of Minnesänger music, which, to judge from the current policy of the bigger 'media companies', means that, even though much (not all, note) of Binkley's superb Telefunken legacy has been reissued, Chominciamento and the other overlooked pieces will now never see the light of day.

Now that is grounds for grumpiness!

The lute - what's to be grumpy?

Quite a lot, actually!

First, obviously... him. Grubby the entry to my lair may be, but I can't bring myself to besmirch it further - suffice to say that the lute (and Dowland) have mingled freely with the discarded bones and guano for some time, thank you; the last thing I allow in the cave is littering by the international entertainment industrial complex.

But wait: is it just my smell - or do surprisingly few music-lovers seem impelled to join me in foraging outside the central repertoire? Isn't that a bit like eating only meat and two veg? In the 1960s, it was perhaps not too much to hope that this wonderful instrument and music might join the mainstream. Today, the lute's perhaps lost its taint of homespun bohemianism but it seems as marginal as ever.

Enough, already!? Lute-lovers have been superbly served on disc over the last three decades (Naxos, signing Christopher Wilson and Nigel North - inspired!). Sure, but the lute's pioneers on record have been almost completely silenced, thanks to a combination of that same lack of curiosity allied to the myopic meliorism which ensures that almost no pre-'HIP' recordings of early music are reissued or broadcast, except those by performers famous in other repertoire.

That's a red rag to Grumpy! I've already passed several old lute recordings all over various newsgroups; now here's a fresh do-do, in the shapely and fragrant form of a groovy little Véga 45 issued in 1959 and entitled, simply, 'Luth', which I just bought from a great eBay LP seller whom I can highly recommend as a nice guy and honest dealer, Gerard of Eagle4Records.

It's played by Mildred Clary, the French music journalist, biographer and broadcaster who seems to have started her career as a guitarist (her Homenaje for Debussy was reissued in EMI France's box of Falla 'Introuvables') and lutenist. I'm not a lutenist meself, so I can't comment on her technique, but I find her manner poetic and well attuned to this music, which she rightly describes as 'd'une très grande beauté'.

Not sure exactly what all the pieces are - early music nomenclature was often pretty vague at the time - so I'd welcome more precise identification! In the meantime, I've labelled the tracks in the FLAC tags pretty much as they are on the sleeve (which conflates the last two bands of Side 2 into one). Here's Clary's original sleeve note:

GREENSLEEVES. — Air célèbre qui date du regne d'Henri VIII, et auquel Shakespeare fait allusion, à deux reprises, dans Les Joyeuses Commères de Windsor.
KEMPS JIG. — Kemp était un comédien célèbre du XVIIe siècle. Certaines pièces de luth lui ont été attribuées.
OPHELIA. — Vieille ballade datant du début du XVIe siècle et que Shakespeare fait chanter par Ophélie, dans Hamlet, lorsqu'elle devient folle.
ALMEN (Allemande). — Cette pièce est de Robert Johnson, luthiste à la Cour d'Angleterre au XVIIe siecle, et renommé autant par son jeu que par ses compositions.
THE SICK TUNE (L'air malade). — D'un auteur anonyme du début du XVIIe siècle.
PIVA (danse d'origine paysanne) et PAVANA ALLA VENETIANA de Joanambrosio Dalza figurent dans un recueil de tablature de luth publié en 1508, et qui est l'un des plus anciens que l'on connaisse.
GAILLARDE. — Pierre Attaignant auquel on doit cette gaillarde, ainsi qu'un grand nombre de danses et autres pièces pour luth, fut l'éditeur de musique de Francois Ier.
FABORDON (Faux-bourdon). — Le faux-bourdon est une sorte d'improvisation sur un plain-chant liturgique. Le premier manuscrit connu où l'on voit ce style d'écriture date du XIIIe siecle.
PAVANE. — Illustre luthiste espagnol, Luis Milan, l'auteur de cette pavane, vécut à la Cour du vice-roi de Valence: Don Fernando d'Aragon. Il compose de nombreuses pièces pour la vihuela (luth espagnol), d'une très grande beauté.

No denoising apart from ClickRepair; 9 mono FLACs, with a sleeve scan, in a .rar file at:
http://www.mediafire.com/file/zhdjjrjjrmo/Vega_CS_45_279_Mildred_Clary.rar

Harrumph!

UPDATE
Mildred Clary died, aged 80, last Thursday, 18th November 2010. Some notices.

Hot Bach de France: Reine Gianoli, 1951

Incomprehensible, really, to me, that such different, personal, committed, superb playing can be left out in the eternal cold by the 'rights' holders. The first, I believe, of many Bach LPs recorded by Gianoli for Westminster, not one of which has been reissued on CD (nor has Petri's Westminster legacy, which is even more incomprehensible). Yes, grumpiness is the only possible response...

I could not find a recording date anywhere; the Westminster LP seems to have come out in 1952 and this British Nixa issue in 1955; the label states it was recorded in Vienna. As so often with piano recordings from this period, the instrument itself is rather out of tune but somehow that hardly seems to matter!

3 fully tagged mono FLACs, declicked only, with a sleeve scan, in a .rar file at:

http://www.mediafire.com/file/3lymtzhyy2g/Nixa_WLP_5101_Bach_Gianoli.rar

Yours ever,

Grumpy

Jeanne Behrend plays Louis Moreau Gottschalk, 1956

For my second dropping, a 12" MGM LP which I bought sealed some years ago on eBay but only opened the other day, as it's just the sort of thing to fling out of my cave-mouth.

I can't now remember when I was first turned on to Gottschalk - perhaps it was by Georges Rabol's Opus 111 CD back in the early 1990s. Then I read S. Frederick Starr's fine biography Bamboula! and later bought Jeanne Behrend's edition of Gottschalk's Notes of a Pianist - one of the funniest and most endearing memoirs that I have ever read, the kind (like Samuel Pepys's diary) that makes the difference in centuries seem irrelevant.

Starr highly recommends Behrend's pioneering 1956 MGM disc, surely the first all-Gottschalk LP, as one of the best. Well, I just had to have it! Having now listened to it, I can't say Behrend's playing is the subtlest I've heard but it has spirit, conviction, authority, drama and a great sense of the pieces' shape. Behrend had previously recorded a recital of early American piano solos, including one by Gottschalk, for Allegro; these remained her only LPs, though she also made 78s, including a set of Saint-Saëns' Carnaval des animaux with Stokowski.

Of course, one important purpose of this uploading exercise is to let you decide - do you agree with Starr? Does this LP and thousands like it deserve its present oblivion?

10 mono FLAC files in two .rar archives:

http://www.mediafire.com/file/etynm2c01tj/MGM_E3370_Gottschalk_Behrend_S1.rar
http://www.mediafire.com/file/ammjingimnm/MGM_E3370_Gottschalk_Behrend_S2.rar

As before, no processing other than ClickRepair and monoing. Track titles and other info in FLAC tags. The order of the pieces as listed on the back cover is not the order in which they're presented on the disc and in my dub!

Grumpy