Latest additions and reviews

Last Sunday I was outbid on the purchase of a 25-CD Messiaen anthology from Warner, published in 2017. No disapointment: I bid stingy (circa 40 €, less that 2 per CD; it was okay to buy it, but cheap only), and in fact, after reviewing more closely its contents, I realize that I didn’t reallly want it, even cheap, as I already have most of its contents.

That’s the problem with these big anthologies: they aren’t well documented online, and the back-cover information isn’t always very explicit: list of performers may be separate from list of works, making it difficult to know who plays what, and sources are not indicated, making it tricky sometimes to establish which recording of “who” the anthology compiles. And now that Warner owns the rights of the Erato, Teldec, EMI and Virgin Classics catalogs (with Erato and EMI being two of the main discographic champions of the composer from the 1960s to the 1990s), the sources may be varied (for instance, Warner has three different recordings of Turangalila-Symphony, two from EMI and one from Teldec, three of Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant Jésus, three of Visions de l’Amen… and five of Quatuor pour la fin du temps).

So I took a couple of days to sort out the contents and sources of four successive Messiaen anthologies from Erato, EMI and Warner, published from 1988 to 2017, and compiling Messiaen recordings from these labels. I haven’t tackled the anthologies from Deutsche Grammophon and Decca (Universal group) – because they are easier to figure out.

Hope this helps the fans of Messian.

Hi friends, thanks for your kind and encouraging comments under my previous post recounting my adventures at the British Library. By the way, I forgot to notify my few subscribers and fans of Vivaldi that I was finally able to purchase, from a Library in Madrid, a scan of Autumn, the first concerto of the Seasons, in Benardino Molinari’s trail-blazing 1927 edition, and thus could confirm the effusive dedication to Mussolini. I’ve added a caption to my review of Molinari’s recording. It doesn’t add much to the review: just a proof of claims made by some commentators and musicologists…

When, back in April, I spent many hours researching the true dating of Alfredo Campoli’s live Four Seasons with the Boyd Neel Orchestra – a recording kept on acetates, discovered in the fiddler’s estate after his death and said by his widow to date from Paris in 1939, which would have made it, if not the first recording of the Seasons ever to be published (it came out in 1995), but at least the first extant documentation of a performance -, I found traces online that Campoli and Boyd Neel had performed the piece and the BBC had aired it, at the end of 1949 and again in the first months of 1951, much more likely candidates than the purported “Paris ca. 1939” that many elements made as good as impossible (a mistake that has made it all the way to the Wikipedia article on The Four Seasons). And, in my review, I claimed (or bragged) that “I can know with absolute certainty only by paying a visit to the British Library in London St. Pancras (that must be near the St. Pancras Eurostar train station, how convenient) to consult back issues of London Calling, “The Overseas Journal of the British Broadcasting Corporation”, and the Radio Times… and that’s not in my immediate plans, although I don’t rule it out.”

Well: I finally did pay a visit to the British Library at St Pancras, and found the issues of The Radio Times that confirm that the performance or performances of Campoli and Neel were aired by the BBC in 1949 and 1951. That factual confirmation doesn’t add much to the review (photos of the relevant listings in The Radio Times, and treating those two broacasts as fact rather than hypothesis) – but establishing that minuscule confirmation, however otiose it may be, is still something of a satisfaction to me.

Now I need to pay a visit to Bibliothèque Nationale de France to try and establish if a version of The Four Seasons with narration ever really existed, or was just a baseless indication in old catalogs and record magazines (see my review of Roland Douatte’s Four Seasons for the details).

I’ve repatriated all my reviews of the music of Peter Mennin (1923-1983) and created a Mennin introductory page with all the links. Once considered one of the greatest American symphonists of the second half of the 20th Century, now hardly ever performed or recorded…

As an offshoot to my work compiling the discography of the Louisville Orchestra (see my blog-post of yesterday) and repatriating to Discophage.com my reviews posted on Amazon.com, I also reposted a number of them, not of Louisville recordings, but usually reviews that I quoted in my Louisville reviews:

The 5 CDs of symphonies of Gian Francesco Malipiero by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra under Antonio de Almeida, recorded in 1993 and 1994 by Marco Polo, and I’ve created a Malipiero introductory page, better go there for links to the reviews. At the time, I had, overall, warmly greeted those CDs

Leonardo Balada’s orchestral works, 4 CDs including the two with recordings from Louisville, see my Balada introductory page for the links. In my reviews I enthuiastically call Balada “one of the best-kept secrets of 20th-Century music”.

Two great collections of American contemporary music conducted by James Levine:

Elliott Carter: Variations for Orchestra (1954-5/1966), Gunther Schuller: Spectra (1958), Milton Babbitt: Correspondences for string orchestra and synthesized tape (1967), John Cage: Atlas eclipticalis (1961). Chicago Symphony Orchestra, James Levine. Deutsche Grammophon 431 698-2 (1994)

Elliott Carter: Variations for Orchestra, Charles Wuorinen: Grand Bamboula for String Orchestra, Roger Sessions: Piano Concerto (Robert Taub), Robert Di Domenica: Symphony. Münchner Philharmoniker, James Levine. “Documents of the Munich Years vol. 2”, Oehms OC 502 (2004)

John Cage: Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano. Maro Ajemian 1950. CRI CD 700 (1995), Él ACMEM88CD (2006)

Gerard Schwarz Performs New Music For Trumpet: Henry Brant (Concerto for Trumpet and Nine Instruments, 1941 revised 1970), Elliott Carter (Canon for Three, 1971, version for three trumpets, version with flügelhorn cornet and trumpet), Richard Moryl (Salvos, 1969), Charles Whittenberg (Polyphony, 1965), Stefan Wolpe (Solo Piece, 1966). Phoenix PHCD 115 (1990)

More reposts to come. This is my summer of reposts.

 

 

 

 

 

Huge – I mean, if you are interested in such minuscule minutiae. A small thing leads to another small thing – but they accumulate. A couple of months ago I took what should have been a quick break from my ongoing chronological and critical survey of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, to repost an old Amazon review, no relation to Vivaldi – I don’t even remember what led me to those reposts, and the blog-post I published at the time doesn’t say (link will open new tab). But that led to another repost, which led to the “pre-publication” of a long-in-the-works CD-discography of the Louisville Orchestra, famous for the encyclopedia of 20th-Century music it published the mid-1950s to 1980 on its house label First Edition Records.

When I published the discography, as my blogpost of the next day recounts, there were still a number of things to complete, the most important (and time-consuming) being:

– to import over here all the reviews I had posted on Amazon.com over the years (and especially in 2007/8) of Louisville recordings. Each import is a helluvalot of work, not just copy and paste but modify all the links, gather the accurate information (recording dates and venues, label numbers, barcodes, sources) and front and back cover photos. Times 50, because that’s the number of CDs I had reviewed. Done. Have a look then at my completed Louisville CD-discography.

– to complete the CD-discography with a discography of the First Edition Records LPs and their digital reissues (CDs and downloads/streaming). Done.

I first published the CD-discography on May 26. It took me two months to complete the job.

Now I’ll go shave.

Melomania, the small brick-and-mortar CD-shop on Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris (formerly “La Chaumière à Musique”, 5 rue de Vaugirard), with a very helpful website (see my 2020 blog-post “The Discographer’s tips…“), after 30 years of operation, is closing down.

The world is coming at its end.

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