Month: February 2022

There’s a long story to this LP, and here it is.

In the late 2013-early 2014, I was on a Michael Tippett listening spree. Tippett is somewhat shadowed by Britten, I consider him something like the “number 2” British composer of the second half of the twentieth-century, somewhat more of a “modernist” than Britten in compositional approach, although he was his elder by a number of years (but Tippett came of age late). These days, sadly, he seems to be suffering the fate of many excellent composers after their deaths: oblivion. Anyway, I am very fond of his music.

Some years earlier, I had found an excellent discography of Tippett online, hosted by The Michael Tippett Society or something of the sort, but when I returned, in 2014, it was, alas, gone – even the website was dead. With some Google browsing I found the contact of a Michael Tippett Foundation, which I thought might be it.

But they said they weren’t the same and knew nothing about the other organization and its discography. The only discography to be found online was the one hosted by Tippett’s publisher, Schott of London, and it was pretty pitiful, its selection apparently chosen at random, and with some essential discs of the Tippett discography not mentioned, like the recording of the complete Piano Sonatas on CRD by Paul Crossley, who had no less than commissionned and premiered Sonatas 3 and 4: not a performer and recording to be neglected.

I was rather incensed to see Tippett so “betrayed” by his own publisher, and I wrote Schott an e-mail that was not particularly kind and polite.

I would have expected them to respond – if they even did – with a resounding “fuck off!”. But no. Schott’s artistic director Sally Groves – she turned out to be the daughter of noted conductor Sir Charles Groves – responded very kindly, and with an invitation:

I have no clue how Sally could have concluded about my “wide expertise as evident on various websites”, as I had written Schott under my real name, not my “Discophage” alias from which she might have infered that I had, indeed, a measure of discographic expertise. I don’t know, maybe she was being ironic, with a typical Brit’ sense of understatement. Like, translated in Texan: “Yeah, buddy! Talkers, we see a lot’ o’ them around here. But why don’t you show if you can DO anything?”

Well, I happily picked up the gauntlet, only asking, as a favor, to be remunerated in scores of Michael Tippett that were missing to my collection – scores of contemporary music, and especially full orchestral scores, are EX-PEN-SIVE! It was ultimately a lot of work, which I’d have done even for free (look at the other discographies posted on this website – and you have no idea how many are dormant on my computer !), so I consider that I made a very good deal.

In constructing my own discography I was able to use, of course, all the previous ones, those published in Tippett biographies and the one, fairly large but far from complete, maintained by the helpful Archivist from Schott Alan Woolgar.

Getting the broad lines was easy enough, what made compiling that discography a helluvalotowork was checking all the minutiae, the obscure releases of obscure Tippett repertoire on obscure labels. It involved exciting sleuth work, too, especially for recordings from Japan and listed online only in Japanese characters (I went to Tippett’s entry and associated ones on Wikipedia English, than clicked on the Japanese page, to copy those names and indications in Japanese characters, and then paste them for Google searches), and it was often with a minuscule but elating sense of victory that some of the riddles were solved.

That research was also, for me, a watershed in my approach to discographies, as it is there and then that I realized the importance of barcodes. Given the vagaries, inconsistencies, and downright mistakes of listings on many online websites, commercial or discographic, I realized that the surest and sometimes only way to find a CD online was using the barcode. This has become since my discographic mantra (see my Christian Ferras CD-discography, for instance), and I’ve had to sweep out many memories from my brain, in order to make space for so many barcodes (I don’t yet dream of barcodes – I think, because I don’t usually remember my dreams… Which raises a difficult question: if androids dream of electric sheep, what does that make me when I start dreaming of barcodes?). I am sometimes dumbsmacked when I go back to some of my pre-2014 reviews and realize that I was lacking accuracy in my referencces to other CDs because… no barcode! Before 2014 was prehistory for me as a reviewer and discographer.

Of course, I took the opportunity of that discography to complete my own collection, with many purchases including of rare LPs that had never been reissued to CD.

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And here how I get back to the LP in question. This one LP from EMI Australia 1972 showed up in the discography and, with its clever coupling of Britten and Tippett’s respective Second String Quartet, it seemed very attractive… but to be found nowhere, except as a listing in the discographies. So, I added it in the permanent searches of my eBay profile… and waited. A fisherman needs patience, nothing moves for a time, until it does.

Well, it took 8 years. Prior to that, the search yielded, occasionally, but it was always junk, pages and listings where the words “Britten”, “Tippett”, “Carl” and “Pini” were mentionned (that’s how Inter… nets function), but never my LP.

And finally, Eureka, end of September ’21, it showed up, a London seller, with bidding deadline set on October 7. I put on all my alarm clocks not to forget that one.

It says a sad tale of the composer’s current standing that I was the only bidder. But, hey, no personal complaint here, I won it for 10 pounds, add customs and post and double the price, but after 8 years of wait I was ready to break the piggy bank. So I paypaled it and waited to receive it.

And waited.

And waited.

And it wasn’t coming, long after CDs subsequently bought from the UK had arrived.

So I started getting alarmed, and thinking that LP was cursed. I contacted the seller, who very courteously gave me the expected appeasing talk, “normal, covid, UK Post, it can take longer, be patient”, but with each day I got more jittery.

So a month later, with deep disappointment I had to cross out any prospect of receiving the LP (it happens, very occasionally, that an order will get lost in the mail), asked the seller for a refund, which was duly afforded. Cursed LP! A fisherman has to be patient, and be ready for the line to break at the last second. So I was going to wait again, for who knows how many years.

And two days later the LP was delivered. I was happy to refund the refund.

Almost the end of my story, but there is a small codicil. Earlier this year I digitalized the LP – clean copy, quite surfaces, there won’t be much de-clicking to do – and put it aside. Some days later, I realized that I needed to take photos of back and front covers – those on the listing had been excellent, but as I let time lapse it wasn’t on eBay anymore. So I looked for the LP – and it was impossible to find where I had put it. I searched everywhere, once, twice, and again, and it was driving me crazy. Cursed LP!

In those cases, go run an errand, get your mind off of it, then start again. So I did – and, of course, it was there, very close to exactly where I thought I had put it, only in a different position than what I had envisioned – more visible, in fact, but when you are looking for the invisible you are likely to miss the visible.

Or maybe it was Buzz Lightyear and the other Toys who had borrowed the LP to rescue the universe, and put it back in it’s place when I left the house for my 10-minute errand of groceries. They are known to do such mischievous things.

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It’ll be some time before a review the LP, I think, because it has to be comparative and I’ll have to plunge in multiple recordings of both quartets. But I thought I wouldn’t wait that long to tell the story of this LP. Cover illustration is pretty nice, too isn’t it?

Ultimately, it is ironic that Schott did close to nothing with my Tippett discography. For a (short) while, it was hosted on a page of their website, so burried that even I, knowing where it was, had difficulties finding it. No chance for a Google search “Michael Tippett discography”. And then, it was gone, even from there. Probably not coincidentally, that’s also when Schott’s Sally Groves retired. Well, their loss: I think it was a great service to the Tippett admirer – however few are left.

I need to repost it here and for that, I’ve got to do a bit of cleaning-up work. Sadly for the composer but happily for the discographer, not much I think has been added to the Michael Tippett discography since 2014.

And, while I was at it, I reviewed a CD of Frescobaldi’s Canzoni on EMI Reflexe, by Kees Boeke (recorders), Wouter Möller (baroque cello) and Bob van Asperen (harpsichord and positive organ). The music is gentle and sweet and ultimately rather boring I find, music not to disturb the courtly patrons, but the review serves as an introduction to the EMI Reflexe collection and its glorious cover art from the 1970s.

I’m back, and we’ll see how long that lasts (I’ve announced so many times that I was back for good to resume my activities of reviewing and discographying, only to be swallowed up by other chores, that I think it’s best to shut up with great proclamations now), with a new review of a mystery Swingle Singers album, from 1990, and the continuation (Part II of III) of my Swingle Singers discography.

In fact – since I have not quit my activities of a compulsive buyer of CDs – I chanced on a Swingle Singers CD from 2015 that I hadn’t been aware of: “Deep End”, on the ensemble’s label, SWINGCD25 (2015), barcode 5037300796666. Normal, my great flurry of Swingle Singers listening and reviewing had been in the early 2010s, and that had led to many reviews posted on Amazon.com (including some of LPs never reissued to CD) and to a number of “Listmanias” which served, to the extent made possible by this “community” feature that Amazon once offered, as an online discography of the Swingle Singers. Well, that lasted until the day Amazon decided that profits were more important to them than communities – and that the two were contradictory – and suppressed overnight all the listmanias.

But that wrong led to a good, and back in 2018 I started reposting my reviews over here, and started a fully-fledged chronological and critical discography, much more complete than what the Listmanias and other Amazon features ever allowed.  I posted Part I of the discography, documenting the French Swingle Singers, in activity from 1962 to 1973. I also drafted Parts II and III, which would have documented the English Swingles, from 1973 to present… and, absorbed in other chores, left it all that time on ice.

So that 2015 CD brought me back to the Swingle Singers and the dormant discography, which I started cleaning up and updating, and I published Part II, 1974-1984, a neat and clean 10-year period, at the end of which founder Ward Swingle stepped out as a singer; from then on he acted as musical adviser and arranger.

In fact Part II of the discography required very little work, the draft I had left in 2018 was in near-publishable form. It’ll take longer with Part III, because there is work required to document and review the many CDs published during that longest period (almost 30 years!) of the Swingle Singers’ existence.

But, researching for Part III, again I chanced on an album from 1990 which, when I first busied myself in the early 2010s with the Swingle Singers’ discography, neither I nor Swingle Singers discographer and biographer Thomas Cunniffe on Jazzhistoryonline.com had been aware of – meaning that neither had Wikipedia, Amazon or Discogs.com: “Spotlight on Bach“, published by the hitherto unknown to me label Sonoton from Germany. Now the disc is documented on Discogs.com – and this is truly serendipitous, as apparently the listing was submitted on February 1 or 2, a mere two weeks before I looked…. The LP edition had been submitted “over three years ago”, and there’s an entry for the LP on the European Amazons, ASIN B003B6VTTQ (but I haven’t found any for the CD; the fact that it doesn’t have a barcode makes it difficult if not impossible to list on Amazon). Its contents are available online as downloads, and the Swingle Singers’ discography on Wikipedia now references, however uninformatively, those dowload editions. Finally… I was lucky enough to find the CD online for sufficiently cheap (there is currently a copy on sale on Discogs, for anyone interested).

And what a bizarre, bizarre album! Since it was published in 1990, same years as the Swingle Singers “The Bach Album“, released on their own label, Swing CD 5, and shares a number of tracks with it (but also omits six from that album), is was tempting to thing that it was, at least partially, another edition of it. But not so simple.

Already, there had been an issue with The Bach Album in relation to the one published by Virgin Classics in 1994 under the title “Bach Hits Back“, which reprised all its contents and added five new tracks. Bach in the early 2010s Cunniffe and myself spent lots of head-scratching time trying to figure out if the Virgin album was simply an augmented reissue of The Bach Album, or new recordings. When I was finally able to find a copy of The Bach Album to compare, it turned out that the question didn’t lend itself to an easy, binary answer “yes” or “no”. Apparently “Bach Hits Back” was different recordings, since tempos usually differed, and they were all sung “a capella” (as became the wont of the ensemble in the early 1990s) where The Bach Album usually had underpinnings of drums and double-bass (as had been the custom established from the start by Ward Swingle with his Paris ensemble).

But closer examination in fact revealed that many tracks were indeed the same recordings, but that tempos had been electronically fiddle with to give the illusion of different recordings, and that, in The Bach Album, the drum-double-bass underpinning had been overdubbed to the a capella vocals later used by Virgin. See the review of The Bach Album for the details on this.

So, back to Sonoton, again it appears that most of the common tracks (save, judging by ear, two) are the same recordings as on The Bach Album, but with different mixings (usually more reverb’) and different drum & double-bass accompaniments.

Does that make Sonoton a “fake” of The Bach Album, or rather, both Sonoton and The Bach Album, fakes of Virgin’s later and entirely a capella “Bach Hits Back”, which one may conjecture are the “original” and “bare” recordings, to which perc’ and bass were overdubbed in the two others?

I thing not. Especially in pop music but not only, an album is not the reproduction, imitation or memento of a live concert, it is an autonomous artefact. You don’t buy, say, Sargent Pepper or The White Album to be the documentation of a concert given on a London rooftop – they are sonic objects in themselves. So I think “The Bach Album” and “Bach Hits Back” are two independant sonic objects, two different Swingle Singers’ variations on Bach, so to speak.

Not so clear with the Sonoton album, because its arrangements and “fiddlings” don’t change or add all that much to their twin tracks in The Bach Album. When a different percussion underpinning, it’s really almost imperceptible.

That said, there is more in “Spotlight on Bach” than on The Bach Album, and that “more” makes it truly outlandish.

First, in many of the pieces, Sonoton offers multiple versions, eg different “fiddlings” with the original source (whatever those may be): with drums and double-bass, with double-bass but without drums, with organ or without or even organ alone, or a capella; slow or faster…

Then, talk about “Spotlight on Bach“! The album also features Beethoven’s Ode to Joy (four versions! A capella gentle, forceful with loud pop drums, the a capella version of the previous and the organ accompanimens of it!) and the first movement from Vivaldi’s Autumn – pieces not otherwise represented in the Swingle Singers discography.

And finally, as if all that wasn’t outlandish enough, the disc ends with 25 tracks featuring 59-second and 29-second versions of the previous tracks! Who is this for? Advertisement companies? “You need a 29-second serving of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy with pop drums to sell spaghetti? You got it!”

Strange label, this Sonoton… From Germany, no barcode. The booklet’s last page lists some of the label’s other publications, and apparently they were specialized in transcriptions of the great Classical hits. Try samples of their Debussy CD on SCD 047. Very thorough discographic info on the label’s suprisingly abundant catalog, here.

To me, as a Swingle Singers completist, the value of the CD stems from the material not otherwise available in The Swingle Singers discography: Ode to Joy (but the “forceful with loud pop drums” version would have delighted Clockwork Orange’s Brian DeLarge….), Vivaldi’s Autumn, the hummed version of Bach’s “Es ist genug” (I thing it moves me because it reminds me of the Finale of Berg’s Violin Concerto), to which I’ll add the a capella version of “In Dulci Jubilo” (for once, not the same recording as the one on Virgin Classics).

Still, this one is really for the die-hard Swingle completist… If you want to hear Bach by the Swingles (and you should), better go to Virgin Classics’ “Bach Hits Back” – because it is much more easily available than both Sonoton’s “Spotlight…” and “The Bach Album”, because it offers five additional tracks to The Bach Album and because, last but not least, it is sung entirely a capella. And don’t forget, of course, the Paris Swingle Singers Jazz Sebastian Bach vols. 1 & 2.

See my review for more details. I’ve also reposted a number of reviews of Swingle Singers albums from the late 1980s and early 1990s, and, if interested, pending the publication of the discography’s Part III with direct links, just type Swingle Singers in the search engine and they’ll show up in reverse order of reposting.