LPs: batch 11 – the earliest music

Posted on April 19, 2010 by vhk10

This batch contained some more of my earlier LPs – Rudolf Firkusny playing Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto with the Pittsburgh SO and three Haydn quartets played by assorted Hungarians on an old Turnabout disc with an entertainingly silly sleeve, which include the ‘Lark’, one of my O level set works. Another Hungarian quartet, the Eders, play Mozart’s K575 and K589 on a Hungaroton.

Another discs was one of the rare duplicates when we came to merge our collections, and by far the earliest music altogether: the pioneering A feather on the breath of God recording of Hildegard of Bingen’s music by Gothic Voices. Choral music of a later vintage: Haydn’s Missa in Tempore Belli with forces from St. Hedwig’s Cathedral, Berlin.

This batch also include the VPO and Kertesz with Brahms’ 4th symphony (surprisingly short) and the Juilliards performing Dvorak’s 6th and Smetana’s 1st quartets.

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LPs: batch 10 – a well-concealed nude

Posted on April 15, 2010 by vhk10

Started with a fairly obscure recording of Schwanengesang by Edouard Stocker and Magda Rusy. This was followed by one of few recordings of American music in the set, some Gershwin conducted by Bernstein … a transfer to Hungaroton. The cover of this is intriguing. At first sight you see a line drawing of a nattily dressed man in 1920’s style clothes – then on closer inspection you realise he is superimposed on a female recumbent nude. Across both of them the words Café Royal appear in mirror-writing, as if you are inside the café and the man and woman are floating outside it.

Alfred Brendel plays two of Beethoven’s lesser piano works, the ‘2nd’ piano concerto and the Choral Fantasy with different orchestras. Alan Civil plays all Mozart’s horn concertos with the RPO and Kempe (they all fit on a disc because some are fragmentary). The Smetana Quartet play the ‘Trout’ and the inevitable Quartettsatz. I started on our many discs of Chopin (who seems to have as many as anyone in our collection) with Tamás Vásáry playing the Etudes (another Taphouse closing-down purchase). Finally, I moved on to another well-represented composer, Shostakovich, with his piano concertos played by Alexeev with the ECO and Maksymiuk.

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LPs: batch 9 – the only opera

Posted on April 9, 2010 by vhk10

This batch was dominated by two sets. One was the only opera we have on LP: Don Giovanni in the version which was used as the soundtrack to the Joseph Loseley film. This is slightly cut but still three LPs’ worth. The other set is Tchaikovsky’s first three symphonies conducted by Karajan. I’m finding that his symphonies are in general just too long for two to fit on one CD, but one on its own is a bit short.

The batch finished with the New World symphony, with the Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Jarvi; there must be a jinx on the recorded quality of this symphony, as this one had a heavy scratch. Finally, Shostakovich’s 1st and his Festive Overture on a Supraphon conducted by Ancerl.

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LPs: batch 8 – remember Rediffusion?

Posted on April 6, 2010 by vhk10

I started these at the weekend. I couldn’t find any music specifically for Easter; the best I could do was Haydn’s Te Deum (paired with the Nelson Mass) recorded by the English Concert. Recorded in August 1986, this must be one of the most recent recordings we have on LP.

This batch was mostly minor works by major composers, or more important works which we have other recordings of. So Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings and Variations from the Op. 55 Suite (LPO and Del Mar) and Mozart divertimenti with the ECO and Jesús López-Cobos (I would guess this was one of his earliest recordings, on the long-gone Rediffusion Royale label). Dvorak’s Symphony no. 5, with the Philharmonia and Andrew Davis, the latter sporting a very 70’s haircut and beard on the sleeve. More Tchaikovsky (I was looking for a pairing for some orphaned music of his that was too short on its own for a CD): the Sleeping Beauty Suite. The Amadeus Quartet playing ‘Death and the Maiden’ and Schubert’s Quartettsatz; this last is a standard filler. And finally: Rudolf Serkin with three famous Beethoven piano sonatas.

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LPs: batch 7 – Holy Week

Posted on April 3, 2010 by vhk10

We don’t have huge amounts of sacred music in our LP collection, but I managed to find some appropriate to the season. Firstly, two settings of the Stabat Mater. The Rossini (conducted by Giulini with the Philharmonia) must be one of the longest LPs in the collection, with one side being about 35 minutes long. Scarlatti’s features Christ Church Cathedral Choir conducted by Francis Grier and was recorded in the familiar acoustic of Merton College Chapel. Also suitable for Holy Week: Pro Cantione Antiqua singing Allegri’s Miserere and Tallis’ Spem in Alium and Lamentations. In fact this was a duplicate in our collection as we also have it on tape, but it’s good to have a backup.

More Italian music of various periods in the shape of some Vivaldi flute concertos and Respighi’s ‘Pines’ and ‘Fountains’ of Rome, the latter slightly incongruously paired with Stravinsky’s Circus Polka and Fireworks op. 4 (played by the New Philharmonia). On the core repertoire there was Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony (the Czech Philharmonic on Supraphon, with that Eastern European brass sound again) and two works often found as fillers but here paired with one another, the Enigma Variations and Brahms St Anthony Variations, played by Monteux and the LSO.

This almost brings me to 50 LPs, so is our estimate of 200+ as the size of the collection about right? I would say that I haven’t reached the quarter-way mark yet, and the total is probably about 220. But if the digitisation operation were a transatlantic liner, it would have left the British Isles well behind and now be out in the ocean with the engine going full steam.

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LPs batch 6: Weymouth in the New World

Posted on March 31, 2010 by vhk10

The cover of our recording of Kubelik conducting the VPO in the New World Symphony is – mysteriously – a painting of Weymouth Bay by Gainsborough; however the record sticks, so no good. To make up for the Debussy Nocturnes that also stuck, I found another LP of the Nocturnes coupled with Ravel’s second Daphnis and Chloe suite, with Abbado and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

The symphony cycle continues with two more discs of Mozart conducted by Neville Marriner and James Conlon, and Beethoven 7 with Colin Davis and the LSO.

Finally a couple of Supraphons of piano music: Klánská playing Janacek’s ‘On the overgrown path’ (sic) and a live recital of Ivan Moravec playing music by Suk, Smetana and Oldrich Korte (of whom I hadn’t previously heard).

Meanwhile, a really irritating glitch in RealPlayer. Polderbits’ track splitting is far from perfect (I’ll write in more detail some other time about this) and it was only when I played a CD over that I realised the final track, a short Etude by Scriabin, had been truncated by the splitter so that the final chord was cut short. Accordingly I went back to the original transcript, divided it again, manually corrected the truncation and wrote the full-length track back to the directory with the other tracks from that LP. I burnt the CD again and to my puzzlement the track was still truncated, though in a fractionally different place. I got to the bottom of this. It seems that RealPlayer works out the length of each file of music it is told about, and never revises the length even when the file is overwritten. It was convinced that the Scriabin prelude was 2 minutes 58 seconds long, and nothing would persuade it otherwise. The only thing for it is to give the re-recorded track a different name rather than overwriting the other. So I’ll have to burn the CD a third time to get the Etude entire. And I don’t even LIKE Scriabin….

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LPs batch 5: some duplicate works

Posted on March 27, 2010 by vhk10

Our stock of Bach on LP is limited and this batch began with part of it, an LP of the E major violin concerto and the orchestral suite in B minor played by two minor German orchestras. I intend to use this as a filler alongside the short recording of cantatas from batch 1. A rarity I suspect is a mixed bag of Tchaikovsky, Smetana and Scriabin played by Frantisek Maxian, Alfred Holecek and Oldrich Hlinka.

I’m now including more recordings of works which we also have in other recordings. Among these is Verdi’s Requiem, with Abbado, the chorus and orchestra of La Scala, and some distinguished soloists. I believe that this company was actually assembled to record something else, but that fell through and so they almost accidentally recorded Verdi’s Requiem, the way one does. Notable of course for the full-blooded chorus – there really is a chorus of top C’s from the sopranos near the end. It’s a DG transfer to… Hungaroton.

Out of season is The world of Christmas, a collection of carols from King’s College Choir, rather surprisingly not including ‘Once in Royal’. The tracks were recorded at different times and some are now half a century old. It captures well the refined sound under Willcocks, with diction that seems a little precious now.

We now have a CD box of complete Mozart symphonies, but there’s still room for nos 38 and 39 with the VPO under Böhm. The final disc in this batch is the standard pairing of Grieg and Schumann piano concertos played by Arrau with the Concertgebouw and Dohnanyi. The cover of this – an old map of Europe – was a little puzzling until I read in the small print that it was published in Amsterdam.

The other end of the process is now cranking into action, with the first actual CDs rolling off the production line yesterday and already being commandeered by members of the family to expand their listening repertoire.

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summer 2013

Posted on March 24, 2010 by vhk10

Thinking ahead, I’ve been making some approaches to Cathedrals about a week in August 2013 for the Cathedral Chamber Choir. Increasingly, Cathedrals are putting bookings on hold until the school holiday dates are settled; this has happened with Canterbury. My letter to Lincoln Cathedral has gone unanswered.

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LPs batch 4: Hungaroton

Posted on March 23, 2010 by vhk10

This batch started with another Karajan disc, a stately recording of Mozart’s Requiem which I must have played many times, to judge by the crackles. I followed this with King’s College Choir singing Britten (Ceremony of Carols/Hymn to St Cecilia/Missa Brevis), which I bought because the first of these works was a set piece for me at school.

One of my old compilation LPs is a disc of Reading Phoenix Choir singing assorted short choral pieces. These include a commission by Bryan Kelly setting a poem about one Linda, who worked in a local factory and was stood up at Caversham Bridge (‘Promises break like biscuits….’). Another is Decca’s ‘Birds in Music’, which precedes bird-inspired music (in good recordings!) with actual birdsong.

Tchaikovsky’s 5th symphony, with the Soviet Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Rozhdestvensky, shows off fine unreconstructed Eastern European brass. It’s a Hungaroton transfer from Melodiya, which meant I had to deduce the conductor’s name from a transcription into Hungarian, the only language on the sleeve.

The only Mahler symphony in our LP collection is the first, with the Israel Philharmonic conducted by Mehta. The sound here is a problem – even allowing for the volume Mahler can reach, it seems over-recorded and I’m not whether that the usual recording settings aren’t causing distortion.

The batch finished with a Hungaraton recording of Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra and Dance Suite (Ferencsik and the Hungarian State Orchestra). It comes with a generously long sleeve note, in several languages.

Why so much Hungaroton? In the dying days of the communist regime we both independently visited Hungary and stocked up on cheap LPs, that being an obvious thing to buy there.

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LPs batch 3: the less popular composers

Posted on March 18, 2010 by vhk10

The process continues apace. I’m afraid at the moment it’s still showing up which are the composers we are less keen on, as I save our favourites for later. I started with another old disc of mine, Holst’s Planets conducted by Malcolm Sargent. Some other composers with a toe-hold in our collection: Prokofiev (his first and third symphonies), Hindemith and Honegger (represented by string quartets). We think the Hindemith and Honegger disc – a Supraphon recording – was passed on by a relative who didn’t like it either.

I included a rather heavy-handed performance by Karajan of Tchaikovsky’s sixth symphony. This lacks a sleeve, and came from the death throes of the once-great Taphouse’s music shop in Oxford. Other duplicated works included Mozart concertos performed by Elisso Virsaladze and the Leningrad Chamber Orchestra, worth transferring if only as a record of how Mozart was interpreted in the USSR.

This batch finished with two discs of Telemann and Handel from my former neighbour Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music. There isn’t a whole lot of early music among our LPs; at the time we were buying most of them performance practice in this area was rapidly changing and new ensembles springing up, so it made sense to build up a collection at a time when there was more choice. By then CDs had taken over.

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LPs batch 2: sticking points

Posted on March 15, 2010 by vhk10

This began with a two-disc set of the Hilliards singing Palestrina’s Canticum Canticorum motets. I’m not a great Palestrina fan in general, but this recording is really exquisite, with clear limpid sound.

Then I moved on to an anniversary composer, Schumann, and a couple of LPs of his symphonies with Muti and the Philharmonia. Sadly, the Rhenish recording stuck. When a recording of Hummel’s violin sonatas (on the obscure Amon Ra label) also stuck, it was time to look into the matter and adjust the balance of the arm. After this the recording no longer stuck and neither did the Schumann, though the Debussy in the previous batch still did.

I followed this with a disc of Schumann’s 1st and 4th symphonies, which runs for well over an hour and must be one of the longer discs in the collection.

Canteloube’s Songs of the Auvergne (sung by Dame Kiri here) are a bit soupy for my taste and will probably be played only in the car; the recording was a 21st birthday present.

The final recording in the batch was Shostakovich’s suite from The Gadfly in an old Melodiya recording. This is a case where it is a shame to lose the cover, a quaintly pastel-tinted photograph of the composer sat at a desk with a spare pair of glasses in front of him.

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a time of penitence

Posted on March 13, 2010 by vhk10

The Chandos Singers broke some new ground with their latest poster, showing a couple of flagellants. The concert was built around two Masses by Adam Michna: his Lenten Mass and Requiem. The former of these is built on a repeating eight-bar bass line, basically in F major with an E flat thrown in for some tonal variety. By the time this E flat had trundled past over thirty times, it had lost something of its novelty, but the movements of the Mass were broken up by other pieces for variety.

For a change we made an excursion into the world of British cathedral-type repertoire. I had never come across Vaughan Williams’ O vos omnes which dates from around the time of his Mass and contains many echoes of passages in it. Nor did I know Leighton’s Quam dilecta, a lengthy anthem with an extended soprano solo (divided between three of us), which reminded me in particular of his second set of Evening Canticles. There is enough Leighton for me to keep on discovering new works by him for some time.

Other pieces included Victoria’s Salve Regina for double choir and two of Poulenc’s Lenten motets. We finished with a composer I’d never come across: Bernhard Lewkovitch’s Exsultate Domino, a jolly setting which changes key signature frequently. Once I’d worked out that the 8/4 bars contained three beats and not four I was all right.

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