Month: May 2025

Mission accomplished – at least the first stage of it: I’ve completed my CD-discography of the Louisville Orchestra (releases from 1989 to 2006), with links to my many reviews, most of them still on Amazon.com and not yet reposted here.

What remains to be done:

– complete the CD discography with a list of the recordings now offered on download (including some reissues that had never been made available on CD),

– complete  the discography with the new recordings of the Louisville Orchestra published since 2006 and the demise of the First Edition Music series – and this is a whole new research, I hadn’t compiled the discography beyond the last reissues of the “historical” Louisville recordings,

– repost my (numerous) reviews from Amazon.com to here (that’s going to take time).

– and, someday, complete the work with a discography of the LPs from the famed First Edition Records series, with references, when they were published, of the CD reissues.

As I was preparing the CD-discography for publication, I found out that there is a Wikipedia page devoted to a “List of First Edition Records releases” (link will open new tab), which, other than the LPs, includes the CDs from First Edition Recordings (label prefix LCD) and First Edition Music (FECD). BUT:

– The list of LCD misses two, LCD0010 and the odd-CD-out LCD500 tribute to pianist Lee Luvisi

– it omits entirely Albany’s early series of CD reissues “First Edition Series / Classics / Encores”,

– at the end of the list of First Edition Music recordings (FECD prefix), it lists as “CD”, but with label number “unknown”, recordings that in fact are available only as downloads,

– unlike my discographies, it doesn’t provide the barcode numbers, indispensable for actually finding the CDs on your most-frequented websites (Amazon is a huge mess… and Discogs.com is occasionally one too).

It wasn’t my plan when I woke up yesterday, but circumstances led me to put aside for a day my comparative and chronological reviewing of The Four Seasons, and to repost a couple of old reviews from Amazon.com:

The Arthur Honegger Centenary / Centenaire d’Arthur Honegger vol. 1 – The Human Tragedy / La Tragédie Humaine: Les Cris du Monde (Helena Tattermuschova Vera Soukupova, Jaroslav Majtner, Prague Philharmonic Chorus, Prague Symphony Orchestra, Serge Baudo), Symphony No. 3 “Liturgique” (Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra, Mario Klemens). Praga PR 250 000 (1992)

…and Louisville First Edition Encores: Arthur Bird: Carnival Scene / George Chadwick: Euterpe / Frederick Converse: Endymion’s Narrative, Flivver Ten Million / Arthur Foote: Francesca da Rimini. Louisville Orchestra, Jorge Mester. Albany TROY 030 (1990)

I had posted the latter on Amazon.com, I think in July 2011. Returning to it with the intention of reposting it, I discovered that, apparently, Amazon had sneakily deleted it. Fortunately I had kept a copy on my computer.

Almost two decades ago, mainly in 2007-2008 (oh Lord, can it be that long past?) I spent lots of time on the CD-discography and reviews of the Louisville Orchestra, made famous from the 1950s on for its commissions from contemporary composers and its admired LP series “Louisville First Edition Records”. I acquired and reviewed most of the orchestra’s various CD reissues, although I’ve reposted as yet very few on Discophage.com. Nonetheless, I took the occasion to start publishing the CD-discography of The Louisville Orchestra, with the links to my reviews on Amazon.com pending repost here. I need to complete it, but half of it is already online.

Posted a long review of a long-forgotten recording of The Four Seasons from the mono era, by Roland Douatte conducting his Collegium Musicum de Paris, on the French label Concerteum. So far back in time (the early boom of the Long-Play record), recorded by a music team that was never considered top-roster, neglected in its own days (it was never reviewed in the leading French record magazine of that era, Disques), burried under by the more glamorous contemporary recordings “of Italian descent” by I Virtuosi di Roma, I Musici, Cantelli, Giulini (and their more prominent labels, EMI, Columbia and Philips), it is a recording shrouded in enigmas. Even the label and label numbering are problematic, because music magazines and catalogs, ads from labels, mentions in discographic encyclopedias, were not reliable and were prone to peddling mistakes, hearsay and unchecked information (including, in the case of Douatte, claims that he had recorded the complete opus 8, and, even more outlandish, that one edition of his Seasons included spoken narration). It took a lot of work and time, not so much to establish the true facts, as to cast strong doubts on the correctness of many of those claims found in the past catalogs and discographies.

And yet, Douatte’s Seasons – digitalized and made available on dowload by Bibliothèque Nationale de France, through the major streaming and download platforms – may be the unknown best version of the mono era. Unlike its competitors, it doesn’t yield to the “tradition” established by Karl Münchinger in 1951 (and the first recording of The Seasons in the LP era) of trudging and solemn Allegros. Douatte’s opening of Spring is lively and merry, the opening Allegro of Autumn sounds indeed like the dancing and singing of the villagers celebrating the new harvest, and his Finale of the same concerto/season does sound like the posse of prancing horsemen on their hunting outing that it is supposed to depict

There was still a long way to go to really illustrate the theatre contained in The Four Seasons (and that took Harnoncourt in 1977), the barking dog, the weeping shepherd, the inebriated villager, the beast at bay, but Douatte took a step in that direction.

Georges Alès, Collegium Musicum de Paris, Marie-Louise Girod, organ and Jacques Wiederker, cello, Roland Douatte circa 1954. LP Concerteum CCX 278 and download

 

Three new reviews of the Four Seasons – the three recordings of Karl Münchinger with his Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra:

In 1951 with Reinhold Barchet, the first recording of the LP era (the two previous versions, by Bernardino Molinari for Cetra in 1942 and Louis Kaufman for Concert Hall in 1947, were reissued to the new medium in 1949)

In 1958 with Werner Krotzinger and the second version in stereo (after I Solisti di Zagreb under Antonio Janigro on Vanguard)

In 1972 with Konstanty Kulka.

And, yes, it took Münchinger three attempts to get The Seasons about right musically (and Kulka is also the best of the three fiddlers), if not particularly imaginatively (and always neglecting the theatre of Vivaldi’s Seasons).