Rosario Bourdon

Rosario Bourdon

Like Victor Herbert before him, and like Hans Kindler after, Montreal-born Rosario Bourdon (1885-1961) began his musical career as a successful cellist before turning to the baton. Very likely his employment by the Victor Talking Machine Company for over twenty years provided the impetus for him to begin conducting. He was hired in 1909 as their in-house cellist (among the most famous recordings for which he served in this capacity is the Bach Double Concerto played by Kreisler and Zimbalist), but he seems to have been conducting regularly for the company by 1915, and beginning in 1920 he shared the post of music director at Victor with Josef Pasternack. Nearly a thousand of the acoustical recordings on which he participated can be heard at the Library of Congress' National Jukebox. After electrical recording was introduced he appears to have made no records as a cellist. Most of his conducting work was accompanying soloists, but he was also responsible for a good bit of light classical orchestral material, of which the following is a fairly representative sample:

Nevin: Narcissus, Op. 13, No. 4
Mendelssohn: Spring Song, Op. 62, No. 6
Victor Concert Orchestra
Recorded February 21, 1928
Victor 21449, one 10-inch 78-rpm record

Rubinstein: Melody in F, Op. 3, No. 1
Rubinstein: Romance, Op. 44, No. 1
Victor Concert Orchestra
Recorded September 4, 1929, and April 8, 1930
Victor 22508, one 10-inch 78-rpm record

Kreisler: Tambourin Chinois, Op. 3
Kreisler: Caprice Viennois, Op. 2
Victor Salon Orchestra
Recorded May 26, 1939
Victor 26306, one 10-inch 78-rpm record

All conducted by Rosario Bourdon
Link (FLAC files, 53.13 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 32.53 MB)

Bourdon left Victor in 1931 to concentrate on radio work, so the last of these 78s represents a rather mysterious guest re-appearance. It lasted barely a year in the catalogue.

Stokowski's All-American Youth Orchestra

Leopold Stokowski rehearsing with the
All-American Youth Orchestra, 1940

Leopold Stokowski's birthday is upon us again (he was born 134 years ago this Monday), and this year I've chosen some samples of his work with the All-American Youth Orchestra, essentially his own creation for the purposes of touring and recording. I will not go into the details, but instead direct you to this article at Larry Huffman's incredible site about the conductor, an article that contains a discography, orchestra roster, and several pictures (such as the one above). The orchestra existed for two years, in 1940 and 1941, and both years are represented here:

Beethoven: Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67 and
Bach-Stokowski: "Little" Fugue in G Minor, BWV 578
The All-American Youth Orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski
Recorded November 14, 1940
Columbia Masterworks set MM-451, five 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 83.82 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 58.94 MB)

Liszt-Stokowski: Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2
The All-American Orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski
Recorded July 8, 1941
Columbia Masterworks 11646-D, one 78-rpm record
Link (FLAC file, 22.03 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 13.03 MB)

Mendelssohn: Scherzo (from "A Midsummer Night's Dream")
Bach-Stokowski: Preludio (from Partita in E Major, BWV 1006)
The All-American Orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski
Recorded July 11 and 20, 1941
Columbia Masterworks 11983-D, one 78-rpm record
Link (FLAC files, 21.38 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 13.07 MB)

The Beethoven set is a relatively recent acquisition for me; but for the two single discs I have revisited the reclaimed record pile. I'm particularly pleased to have reclaimed the Bach-Mendelssohn disc, for it was a gift from my first piano teacher, George A. Neely (1903-1990), with whom I began lessons at the age of 11. Mr. Neely was a kind man who traveled to our neighborhood once a week to give lessons to kids in their homes. When he learned of my interest in collecting classical 78s, he decided to give me his entire collection - accumulated 25-35 years previously and containing some 40 or 50 sets, among them all the Beethoven and Brahms symphonies! The Stokowski record I'm sharing here is all I have left of this largess. I took lessons from Mr. Neely until I was fourteen, at which point I wanted to learn to play Shostakovich and he declared he had nothing left to teach me, so another teacher was found. But I remember Mr. Neely with the greatest fondness, am grateful for his many gifts, and hope I give as much to my own students as he gave me.

Mendelssohn: Quartet No. 1 (Budapest Quartet)

I've lately managed to acquire a few sets by the Budapest String Quartet in their glory days - when the group still boated one Hungarian in their lineup (István Ipolyi, viola) but was otherwise transitioning to the all-Russian ensemble that defined them for later generations. These recordings date from 1933-35, and in most cases my copies are really nice ones on Victor "scroll" labels as depicted above. One of the rarest is of this Mendelssohn quartet, which seems to have lasted only a couple of years in the Victor catalogue:

Mendelssohn: Quartet No. 1 in E-Flat Major, Op. 12
The Budapest String Quartet (Roisman-Schneider-Ipolyi-Schneider)
Recorded April 29, 1935
Victor Musical Masterpiece set M-307, three 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 69.62 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 42.83 MB)

This is the quartet that has the famous "Canzonetta" - which was often recorded as a separate piece in those days, but this appears to be the only recording of the complete quartet made during the 78 era.

Mendelssohn: "Italian" Symphony (Harty)

This week, I present one of the last major recordings made by the Hallé Orchestra under the man who guided its musical fortunes for 13 years (from 1920 to 1933), the great Sir Hamilton Harty (1879-1941). This is their 1931 recording of Mendelssohn's "Italian" Symphony, an endearing reading full of vivacity and authentic string portamenti, in a splendid early Columbia "Vivatonal" pressing I was lucky enough to find recently:

Mendelssohn: Symphony No. 4 in A Major, Op. 90 ("Italian")
The Hallé Orchestra conducted by Sir Hamilton Harty
Recorded April 10, 1931
Columbia Masterworks Set No. 167, three 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 90.41 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 62.77 MB)

Included with the download is the original 16-page booklet of program notes, which even includes a listing of all Columbia Masterworks sets available up through the time of this release at the end of 1931. It reveals that even at this late date, no less than fourteen of Columbia's earliest acoustical sets were still available for sale.

Encores - The First Piano Quartet

Founded in 1941 as a radio ensemble, the First Piano Quartet, consisting of four pianists - Vladimir Padwa, Frank Mittler, Adam Garner and Edward Edson - enjoyed great popularity during its first decade or so of existence. It's easy to understand why. Their arrangements, made by the players themselves, were great fun, were usually quite brilliant and were performed with a tightness of ensemble that made the four pianos sound almost like one super-piano. The music chosen, popular classics and semi-classics, made few demands on listeners' ears; the pieces never exceeded two 78-rpm record sides in length. When the "FPQ" began recording for Victor in 1946, the company initially didn't consider them Red Seal material, putting their first three single releases and their first album (a set of Lecuona favorites) in the black-label 46-0000 "Double Feature" series. By 1948 these had all been reissued with red labels, and all their subsequent releases appeared as Red Seals, including this, their third album:

First Piano Quartet Encores:
Liszt: Liebestraum No. 3
Grieg: In the Hall of the Mountain King
Rimsky-Korsakov: Flight of the Bumblebee
Mendelssohn: Scherzo in E minor
Villa-Lobos: Polichinelle
Brahms: Lullaby
Rachmaninoff: Italian Polka
Schubert: Moment Musicale No. 3
Liadov: The Music Box
Shostakovich: Polka (from "The Golden Age")
Virgil Thomson: Ragtime Bass
Recorded Dec. 22-23, 1947
RCA Victor WMO-1263, three 45-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 57.85 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 42.70 MB)

The group's last RCA release was 1952's "FPQ on the Air" (LM-1227/WDM-1624), by which time Padwa had been replaced with Glauco d'Attili - the first of numerous personnel changes to the ensemble. A few EP reissues followed, but their recordings had all but vanished from the Schwann catalog by 1959, though the group continued to exist until 1972.

Mendelssohn's Octet: The First Recording

It seems almost unbelievable, when one looks at the 1948 Gramophone Shop Encyclopedia of Recorded Music, to realize that Mendelssohn's youthful Octet, that freshest example of his teenage genius, was unavailable to the record buyer except for three recordings of the Scherzo in Mendelssohn's own orchestration (as intended for the première performance of his First Symphony).  Such, however, was the case, since this first recording, from 1929, had long been deleted, and the second recording, by the Pro Musica Ensemble led by Henri Merckel, from French Polydor, had not yet been issued.  And the first recording had not even received very wide circulation, being aimed at the British market, with no representation on Victor:

Mendelssohn: Octet in E-Flat, Op. 20
International String Octet
Recorded February 18 and 22, 1929
HMV C 1672 through C 1675, four 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 87.96 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 35.65 MB)

The rather enigmatically-named "International String Octet" was really two separate string quartets, the International String Quartet headed by André Mangeot and the Poltronieri String Quartet headed by Alberto Poltronieri.  Both groups were active in the recording studios - but for the National Gramophonic Society, not HMV; and the Poltronieri Quartet also recorded for Columbia.

Happy Birthday, Dimitri Mitropoulos!

Dimitri Mitropoulos

Tomorrow, March 1, is the birthday of the great Greek conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos (1896-1960), and so I present his first recording of a piece that was one of his specialties, the often-maligned "Scotch" Symphony of Mendelssohn. David Hall, in a supplement to his 1940 Record Book, confessed that this symphony was not a favorite of his among Mendelssohn's works, but that Mitropoulos' "arresting and revelatory reading" had forced him to revise his opinion!  And indeed Mitropoulos finds just the right blend of excitement and poetry in the piece:

Mendelssohn: Symphony No. 3 in A minor, Op. 56 ("Scotch")
Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos
Recorded December 6, 1941
Columbia Masterworks set MM-540, four 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC file, 86.58 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 39.98 MB)

This recording was made on the Saturday of that fateful weekend when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, drawing the USA into World War II; I'm sorry to say that this pressing was made under wartime conditions with recycled shellac, but I have done what I could with it.  Mitropoulos recorded the symphony again twelve years later, with the New York Philharmonic.

Cover design by Alex Steinweiss
(restored by Peter Joelson)

I was saddened yesterday to hear of the death of Van Cliburn, who had been suffering from bone cancer since last August.  His New York Philharmonic debut, in 1954, was under Mitropoulos' direction, and Cliburn is the only person I am aware of to repeat Mitropoulos' feat of simultaneously playing and conducting Prokofiev's Third Piano Concerto - once, at a concert memorializing Mitropoulos!

Cliburn's famous 1958 recording of the Tchaikovsky concerto, incidentally, appears to have been the last extended classical work ever to have been issued in a short-playing format - 3 extended-play 45s (RCA Victor set ERC-2252), with the first movement spread out over four sides just as it was in the days of 78s!

Mendelssohn: Elijah (Sargent, 1947)

Felix Mendelssohn died on November 4, 1847, and to commemorate the 100th anniversary of this, Columbia issued this set of one of his grandest works, the 1846 oratorio Elijah.  This set actually was intended to replace an earlier (1930) recording of the work, conducted by Stanford Robinson, which featured two of the same soloists on the present recording - Isobel Baillie, soprano, and the great Harold Williams, bass-baritone, in the title role.  The other two soloists are Gladys Ripley, contralto, and James Johnston, tenor.  Except for Williams, these are exactly the same forces (soloists, chorus, orchestra and conductor) that were heard on the previous year's recording of Handel's Messiah which I uploaded around this time last year.  (Sargent would go on to record the work again, about ten years later, with the same chorus and orchestra but with different soloists.)

Mendelssohn: Elijah - Oratorio, Op. 70
Soloists, Huddersfield Choral Society and Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra
Conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent
Recorded May 29 - June 1, 1947
Columbia Masterworks Set MM-715, sixteen 78-rpm records in two volumes
Link (FLAC files [part 1], 175.22 MB)
Link (FLAC files [part 2], 161.05 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 154.12 MB)

The Flonzaley Quartet and After

The Flonzaley Quartet

Today I present the legendary Flonzaley Quartet in the only complete 20th century quartet they recorded, the Dohnányi Op. 15.  This is one of their rarer recordings; in fact, I am unaware of any LP or CD transfer of this set, though most of the Flonzaleys' other early electrical sets were covered by Biddulph in a pair of double-CD packages during the 1990s.  Well, here it is, in a transfer I originally offered in 2008:

Dohnányi: Quartet No. 2 in D-Flat, Op. 15
The Flonzaley Quartet
Recorded October 20 and 21, 1927
HMV DB 1135 through 1137, three 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 69.3 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 26.74 MB)

The Flonzaley Quartet disbanded in 1929, but its members (which by this time were Adolfo Betti and Alfred Pochon, violins; Nicholas Moldavan, viola; and Iwan d'Archambeau, cello) continued to work in other quartets.  One of these was the Stradivarius String Quartet, in which Pochon and d'Archambeau were joined by Wolfe Wolfinsohn, first violin, and Marcel Dick, viola.  In 1937 the group made a handful of recordings for Columbia, of which perhaps the most important is this Mendelssohn quartet (again, originally offered in 2008):

Mendelssohn: Quartet No. 3 in D, Op. 44, No. 1
The Stradivarius String Quartet
Recorded January 27, February 4, April 19 and 22, 1937
Columbia Masterworks Set 304, three 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 59.77 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 24.47 MB)

Violist Moldavan went on to become a founding member (along with violinists William Kroll and Nicolai Berezowsky and cellist Jack Gottlieb) of the Coolidge Quartet, a very interesting group: named after that patron saint of 20th century chamber music, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge (whose own String Quartet in E minor the group recorded); they started a project to record the complete Beethoven quartets, but abandoned it after No. 8 when the war and the Petrillo recording ban of 1942-44 intervened.  They also recorded quite a few American works, including quartets by Griffes, Loeffler, Mason, and by their own second violinist Berezowsky, as well as Roy Harris' piano quintet (with the composer's wife, Johana, at the piano).  Their first recording was of this Hindemith quartet (also a 2008 transfer):

Hindemith: Quartet No. 3, Op. 22
The Coolidge Quartet
Recorded May 20, 1938
Victor Musical Masterpiece Set M-524, three 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 48.93 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 25.77 MB)

Finally, for anyone interested, I have put up three videos on YouTube with my own harpsichord- and piano-playing; here are the links:

Maple Leaf Rag
Hovhaness: Dark River and Distant Bell
"Linus and Ludwig"

Sanromá and the Boston Pops

Puerto Rico-born Jesús Maria Sanromá (1902-1984) was for 20 years the official pianist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.  While in this capacity, he recorded six concerted works for piano and orchestra with the Boston Pops under Arthur Fiedler, one each year between 1935 and 1940.  This is the offering from 1938, the Mendelssohn Piano Concerto No. 1 in G minor, taken from a slightly worn copy of Victor set AM-780.  The concerto takes 5 sides of the three records; on the last side is a solo recording by Sanromá of two of Mendelssohn's "Songs Without Words":

Link (FLAC files, 52.04 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 26.98 MB)

This might be my last post for a couple of weeks, as I have been asked to perform the solo harpsichord part of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 with a local community orchestra on Oct. 24, and preparing this will be taking up most of my free time between now and then.  So to tide everybody over, here are links to all the Arthur Fiedler-Boston Pops recordings I had transferred and posted previously to RMCR, one of them another of the Sanromá piano concertos:

Gluck-Mottl: Ballet Suite No. 1
Recorded March 24, 1940
Victor Musical Masterpiece set M-787 (2 records)
Link (FLAC file, 39.29 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 21.07 MB)

Khatchaturian: Masquerade Suite (Waltz, Nocturne, Mazurka, Romance, Galop)
Recorded June 18, 1947
RCA Victor set DM-1166 (2 records)
Link (FLAC file, 43.13 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 20.92 MB)

MacDowell: Piano Concerto No. 2 in D minor, Op. 23 (with Jesús Maria Sanromá)
and
Ibert: Divertissement
Recorded July 1, 1936
Victor Musical Masterpiece set M-324 (5 records)
Link (FLAC files, 89.35 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 46.28 MB)

Rossini-Britten: Matinées Musicales (March, Nocturne, Waltz, Pantomime, Moto perpetuo)
and
Rossini-Britten: Soirées Musicales - Tarantella
Recorded June 21, 1947
RCA Victor set DM-1204 (3 10-inch records)
Link (FLAC files, 38.9 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 19.2 MB)

And, one with the Fiedler Sinfonietta (a chamber orchestra composed of Boston Symphony players);

Telemann: Don Quichotte Suite
Recorded March 21, 1940
Victor Musical Masterpiece set DM-945 (2 records)
Link (FLAC file, 40.43 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 16.86 MB)