Orchestras and their sound

You can tell an old hand by one's ability to recognize the particular sound – of an orchestra, of a pianist, of a violinist. The task is easier whith singers. Even the most inexperienced opera lover can tell Pavarotti from Carreras and Bruson from Bastiannini (though it is not exactly that simple with ladies from a certain register upwards). But who can tell today the Oslo Philharmonic from the Philharmonia? Or the Saarbruecken RSO from the Rotterdam Philharmonic? Very few indeed. And this hard test has become even harder by the homogenization of orchestral sound around the world. Could any of you tell the New Zealand SO from the Royal Scottish SO in the Tintner Bruckner cycle (NAXOS) – except that New Zealanders sounded more at ease with the idiom than the Scottish?

It was not at all like this a few decades back. Telling the NBC SO from the PSO of New York was relatively essential for collectors with a decent amount of LPs on their shelves, as it was to tell the Berliner Philharmoniker from the Concertgebouw or from the Czech PO. Each of the known orchestras of the world, big and small, famous and obscure, first, second or third class, had their own sound. (Much younger I could immediately tell – in medias res, as it were – that the Athens State Orchestra were playing, from the different tuning among instrument families – but that was more like… cheating.) The Chicago had its own unmistakable sound; so did the Cleveland and Boston, so did Philadelphia, Minneapolis and Pittsburgh (and had Indianapolis been as lucky to have signed a good fat contract with some of the major producers, they too would have been easily recognizable). In Europe it was impossible to take the VPO for the BPO or the Paris Conservatoire for Lamoureux, the Gewandhaus for the Saechsische Staatskapelle (later Dresden State Orchestra), the Vienna SO for the London Symphony and the Philharmonia for the Royal Philharmonic. Well… try to tell any of these today. Chances are you are in for some major blunders.

So what’s happened to orchestras worldwide? Is it the stereo that has corrupted our listening tastes or is it merely the absence of great conductors that caused the expansion of such homogenous sound like a pandemic? I think both, but mostly the second. You see orchestras do have their own sound – very much the combination of the musicians that form them and the characteristics of the hall they play in – but great conductors too had their own sound and this was imposed over that other composite subtotal and produced the unmistakable sound total of each orchestra, either live in their hall or recorded at location. But Toscanini sounded the same conducting his NBC or the RSO of N.Y. or at La Scala in Milan. And Munch produced in Paris the same sound he produced on the podium of New York or later Boston – as Reiner did in Pittsburgh and Chicago, Mitropoulos in New York, at the Metro or in Vienna, as Stokowski did in Philadelphia or in New York or any other orchestra he conducted. I even heard him in Athens with our horror of an orchestra during the early 60s and didn’t believe my ears. It was little short than if the Philadelphians were playing. And so on and so forth. Of course an essential element was that conductors stayed for years in their posts and rarely flew to other cities or even continents there to conduct their “second orchestra”.

So those were the symbiotic times of orchestras, halls and conductors, and the outcome of this synergy can be heard today on their reissued recordings that corner such a big part of the market today, even the big names have noticed. DG Originals, SONY Legacy, Testament, various Philips back editions (and of course Naxos and a score of lesser producers) have made once more money from the great musical tradition of the “radio times”. This cohesive bond between orchestras and their leaders (not the American sense of leader, but true leaders of orchestras) seems to be one of the basic reasons a vast part of the record buying public has turned to “historic” recordings (the term used nowadays for recordings spanning from at least the 30s to the late 60s). In a sense they were really historic: the sense of past perfect…

What is a great conductor?

Well, let’s define great. For me a great conductor is one who like the older Hollywood directors could do anything: a Western, a musical, a noir, a cloak-and-dagger and a melodrama with the same ease and the same professionalism. How many conductors could do this? Well, it's an area not surprisingly occupied by a great number of names – but surprisingly not numbered with the “Great”: Kletzki, Kurtz, Galliera, Ackerman, Monteux, Leinsdorf, Ormandy, Rodzinski and Beinum – to name but very few of them. These are my heroes.

Of the conductors categorized under “Great” most were great in something, not everything. Some area of the repertory only. Take Toscanini. Beethoven, Brahms, Respighi, Mendelssohn, Mussorgsky and Wagner bleeding-chunks. Verdi and Puccini. OK. Of course you cant’ say “and that was all” – for that was quite a lot. Take Klemperer. Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, Mozart, Wagner, Mahler, Bruckner. Not the best for all, not always, but music making that was never indifferent. Take Furtwangler. Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Wagner. And backwards again. Each has his fervent admirers and his equally fervent detractors; less famous men had fewer of both.

So the crux of the matter is simply the definition of greatness – and there lies the rub. A matter of priorities and a matter of values.

Some will call “great” a conductor who makes interesting, even enjoyable, second rate works. Such is the domain of sir Thomas Beecham. Of course the English wouldn’t agree. For them sir Thomas is the peer of Toscanini, Furtwangler and who else. Only – we can’t tell. We don’t have his central European repertoire, his Wagner, his Schubert-Schumann-Wagner. He didn’t put them on record, if he ever grappled with them. Talk of overpraised men. But – Great? Depends on the nationality of the audience I am afraid.

Others will call “great” a conductor who devotes all his energy to propagate the new, the experimental, the researching, the ground breaking. There, first and foremost, you have Mitropoulos, but also Rosbaud, Scherchen, Monteux, Markevitch, Maderna, Boulez, Gielen, Rowicki, Zagrosek, Bertini.

And then there’s the “great” conductor who’s acting great… E. g. Karajan. “Der Mann K.” as Furtwangler referred to him in horror, didn’t revolutionize anything; he played everything because he was selling everything, like a Mercedes is the car to get over a certain income level. But then so did Ormandy, who never enjoyed such adulation or publicity and – although unacknowledged by the critics, at least in Europe – practically did a much better show of it. Karajan almost wrecked the Philharmonia. He definitely destroyed the Berliners. And became rich by spinning a web all over the World (bar the USA, where he wasn’t welcome by the pre-and post-WW II refugees) which secured him royalties from everything he’d be involved in. Having been advertised as Das Wunder Karajan when he was spotted by Walter Legge, he later perpetuated the blurb single handed. The only Wunder about him was his egotism, his despotism, his deep rooted Nazism and his insensitive music making. Few were his peers in that. (Ever wondered why a man who played literally everything, never played Mahler?)

Stokowski has been an early prototype of that kind – but there the analogy ends. If the man was conceited at a certain stage of his long career, it was about his ability as an orchestra builder and a genial interpreter of music he liked, which he was. After all he lived in the Americas when music wasn’t yet such a hot potato as was elsewhere and during a time when there were too many other great musicians active around (Walter, Mitropoulos, Szell, Reiner, Munch, Ormandy); so his tendency to over hyped greatness was kept in relative check. Lenny did better. His times offered more for the act. The old-school Great had passed away, Karajan secure in his Prussian citadel didn’t care: he had written off Vienna and the old capital returned the feeling. New York had gently ousted Lenny and the Wiener Philharmoniker waited him to make their peace with God for their collective Nazi past (some say and present) through the mediation of a Jew. Whilst his ample New York recorded output can be called serviceable, the recordings that followed with the Viennese is mostly suspicious. But who cared? He was Lenny, so full of love for all, so full of New World simplicity and outgoingness. And after all he sweated so profusely, it couldn’t but be great. He was (and he remained) at his best on TV.

There is another category. The “Kapellmeisters”. Bohm, Krips, Keilberth, Krauss, Konwitschny, Sanderling, Swarowsky, and scores of others, musicians who uphold a great tradition, who don’t “take chances” (i.e. impose their ego on the music) and who trust the Urtext to give to the public the shivers by the means of its musical content. You can never go wrong with them and oftener than not you discover that force allargandos and accelerandos aren’t the only recipe to keep the public sitting at the edge of the chair. Over-interpretation is as bad as indifference and routine. Stressing the obvious is a mortal sin in performing arts. And the once snubbed “Kapellmeisters” are very useful today in reminding us that whatever needed be stressed in a musical text, it was stressed by the composer.

In Art being smart never pays much dividends.

You also have the “mavericks”. Those individualistic interpreters who manage to turn their huge egos to an equivalent of the creative artist and get away with it – often with honors. Mengelberg, Koussevitzky, Stokowski and Knappertschbusch (in his gemutlich Viennese manner), were important, imposing personalities that overrode the text and imprinted their will on it, at all times convincingly. (Karajan may have been the wrong kind of the species.)

Then there is a way you can tell the great from the less great: they have a sound of their own which you can tell no matter what orchestra they lead. But orchestras have their sound too – big and small, good and not always good . We’ll come to that later.

How it all started

When I was a kid there was no music, no singing at home. We were not gloomy people. Just nobody particularly liked music. My pa used to quote Tolstoy: "music and artillery are the most expensive of noises". Dear pa! An intellectual, he felt he should ratify his likes or dislikes with a theory. His or someone else's. Anyway I was different. I loved music since the day I remember myself. I listened to the radio: songs of course. What we call today pop. But with a difference. All my attention was captured by what was going on behind the voice, the instruments, the orchestra. Then came the radio Third Program. They played records. Some so badly used you heard the persistent clicks and pops. I still expect the big scratch to come in the middle of the Respighi Concerto Gregoriano played by German violinist Stiller (?) and conducted by Ernst Borsamsky. (Anyone remember those names?) Then came record buying, the beginning of a lifelong addiction. Rudimentary pickup connected to radio set up, the ancient predecessors of today's (yesterday's actually) hi-end wherewithal. I still have my first Philips deck, playing 78s, 45s and 33 rpms, safely hidden behind a record cabinet in my listening room. You changed the needle with a lever, at the side of the head, a thick one for the 78s, a thinner for the rest. 78s I never had. Nor wished to have. Long playing was the pinnacle of sound recording technology, no record collection of my elders at home to cherish and learn to love - only some light music 78s I can't recall where were they found and ended up on my shelves: Victor Sylvester's orchestra playing tangos, some songs. That was all.

LPs were expensive. All were imported. The most consistent of importers were Philips, and my father had a friend of his in some important post there. We bought with a 25% discount. But we bought once or twice a year. My father must have felt this was the most unreasonably spent money he ever paid for anything. But he had to oblige me in Christmas and on my birthday.

So Philips was instrumental in shaping my tastes. We bought whatever was on the catalogue irrespective of the names of the performers. DGG (a separate producer then) was not so well distributed. As for Columbia, they came from England - later to become HMV and later EMI. RCA was scarce. You found German pressings and American pressings in various outlets. Decca had an individual representative who imported minimal classical numbers. My friends and I read the catalogue and our mouths watered - but there was nothing to be found. The man either hated classical music or he didn't bother to order any numbers that weren't guaranteed to sell. VOX was present much later and by then the market had opened for classical music. The guys who imported them from the U.S. and from France brought virtually everything on the VOX catalogue. The difference was audible both recording-wise and interpretation-wise, I must say. But young, avid collectors on a budget didn't have the luxury to pick. VOX was the equivalent of paperback novels. You bought them and got the gist of the work at least. Sometimes you'd be pleasantly surprised by major interpretations who beat the great names of the "big" brands. Like Horenstein's Ninth. (There still is ONE Ninth, eh?) Who'd beat the hell out of Bruno Walter's New York record on Columbia. Or Grischkat's Vespro who stressed the romantic-epic character of this masterpiece in a way the more stylish Lewis on Oiseau-Lyre (which cost three times the price of the double VOX album) wasn't able to for all the Ritchies of the world.

Decca ffrr s made from the very start a great impression. A friend of mine had at home a modest library. In this Rach2 with Katchen/Fistoulari and the so-styled New Symphony Orchestra of London left indelible memories. And on another ffrr at my friend’s, there was the Concertgbouw / Kleiber Beethoven 7 – this one never removed from its throne! There I fell in love with Ravel’s Ma Mere l’ Oie played by the Bostoners and Koussevitzky. The flip side housed Bolero. Their Ninth was Bruno Walter on two Columbias – but I always preferred mine: Otterloo with The Residency Orchestra (The Hague) and the impressive “Toonkunst” Choir on a Philips twofer which also accommodated on side 4 Egmont and Coriolan Overtures. I have been missing this 9th for decades now, till recently thanks to the advise of my Dutch friend Rolf’s I bought from Amsterdam a 10-CD box with many of the mono Otterloos of the 50s. Among which this one: Still THE Ninth, for me from the 29 in my collection.

Which brings me to another topic – the indelible mark that a first hearing leaves us each time we first come across a composition. But I shall deal with this at another instance.

Back to first experiences and first loves. The Callas/Gobbi Rigoletto was a great favorite. My friend's parents had only two complete opera sets: that one and the Toscanini/Traviata. I can claim solid fundaments as an opera lover. His father did for a spell import some Remingtons. He was an electrical appliances dealer, had split from his partners and tried to survive on his own. I inherited these Remingtons and I love them. I love their jackets artwork, I love their piercing highs and the scrappy but enthusiastic playing of the so-called Austrian Symphony Orchestra which was a pseudonym serving, as it seems, both the Vienna Volksoperorchester and the Tonkuenstlerorchester, Niederoesterreich who played the New World Symphony (still #5 that time) under George Singer, the Tchaikovsky Pathetique under H. Arthur Brown, accompanied Friedrich Wuhrer in Beethoven no.4 under Karl Randolph (two sides for this!) and the Fritz Busch Eroica. My friend didn’t care at all for any of them, so I got them when I asked. I have given innumerable hours reconstructing the sound, for all were in bad condition. But I am very proud of the results and now they are in the bearac_reissues catalogue for anyone willing to explore them.

These were the times the Viennese knew hunger ( I should know, as my nick here in this blog vouchsafes) and their orchestras played for a handful of dollars for the Remington and the Vox engineers & producers who rushed to get the European flavor back to their public in the States. For years I also thought the conductors were under aliases too. Frizt Busch was the only one I knew. It’s a very recent discovered that both George Singer and H. Arthur Brown existed, the first an opera conductor, active mainly in Israel, the second a very important personality who did much to promote music in his area, El Paso. You can look up H. Arthur Brown at the site devoted to him. His Remington Pathetique is an exemplary rendition, he manages to build tension and drama without hysteria – a really classical reading.

And the years went by and LPs accumulated asking for more room. CD arrived just in time. Where 65 LPs were housed I now could accommodate 88 CDs dividing horizontally the space in two. Like everyone else I started buying new DDD recordings to enjoy the sound. But I had for some decades before been listening to such great artists – the younger generation didn’t cut any mustard. Pollini is one instance. I gaped at the technique and the leanness of his renditions but little by little I started getting rather tired of an ever so imperceptible degree of heartlessness on his part. Too clinical. A keyboard Boulez. I no longer listen to his CDs. There’s always someone plays them equally “perfectly” but does so infusing his (her) reading with a more humane streak.

And as I had started looking nostalgically back to my LPs which I didn’t play any longer, reissues started coming. I gradually replaced most of them; new issues were bought rarely and sometimes returned to the dealers. I had a subscription to Gramophone since 1969. Gramophone proved to be a very frustrating experience after all. I read their high brow reviews chewing my lips each time Charles Munch and Markevitch were simply ignored as Berliozeans of the first order and the unimaginative and soft cored Colin Davis got the crown – compared only, where possible – to sir Thomas Beecham. I marvelled at the temerity of these guys to argue about the New Philharmonia being a world class orchestra (which they weren’t) and their unashamed promoting of the old and unsteady Klemperer’s Beethoven, Brahms and Mozart (even the operas got an A) or Karajan’s homogenized sound over the complete orchestral repertoire from DG and Berlin. Even the Berliners pale and whining first oboe sound was praised. One could see why all this. The ads – my god – the ads. Who paid for the “esteemed publication”? The ads did. That is, the big companies, EMI and Polygram, later swallowing Philips, Mercury, Decca and the biggest part of their antagonists. I kept on reading Gramophone though. For one thing, it was a way of knowing what was new. I read it more as a Swann Catalogue in small instalments. Never the reviews. There were exceptions of course. Robert Layton was an excellent critic and so were Ivan March and Trevor Harvey (not always this last one, but most of the time). There was also someone very good writing the Opera section - very good indeed, but I forget his name. The majority gave the unfortunate impression of mercenary writers. You could sometimes understand how bad a new recording was by reading between the lines (even behind some carefully selected words – because, well, most of them were knowledgeable and they couldn’t leave all of their good taste at home). But «payroll oblige», as the French might put it.

And speaking of French, I also read Diapason, though not systematically. The French had their soft spots too. But for the most part were (somewhat surprisingly) less chauvinistic than their English counterparts and never shy to mention much older recordings, even of the mono era, in comparison – ending naturally with far less *stars* for the new arrivals. Best of all I found to be the American reviewers. Some even wrote for English publications, e.g. Hi-Fi News & Record Review a.o. I found Americans the most consistent, informed and knowledgeable of all. Germans too of course. And Italians, it must be said. Of course how you read criticism is also a matter of taste.

And so LP came to pass on CD transfers. Not always successfully. There were horrendous jobs done there, there were also very successful ones. All in all I could now have on the convenient new carrier my music. And bought most of my collection back. There was no discount for me from either Philips or Decca or RCA or CBS (now Sony). I couldn’t do otherwise.

Some though I didn’t. Not all my LPs were worthy of replacement. And many never appeared on the new format; till, recently, I discovered some pages in the Internet that offered exactly what was missing. “Private LPs to CD transfers”. Pierre Paquin, John Wilson, Lahni Spar (an oboist) on his own site and David Gideon on his, all offered excellent digitizations of rare LPs. Not only of those I had on my shelves, waiting in vain their resurrection in the new format, but even many LPs I wasn’t able to buy when they still were out (years ago!) and sorely wanted. These were the luminaries that set me on the warpath. Most of all Pierre was instrumental in this. Here is how.

Like myself Pierre is a Munch fan. I got the virus during the early 60s when our radio rented from the US tapes of live concerts at Symphony Hall, transmitting them with 3-4 weeks delay, on Sunday mornings. I was ready with my tape recorder and recorded them. I remember great Berlioz of course, but also a beautiful Brahms 1st Serenade for orchestra, a near ideal Mozart K.466 with Monique Haas and modern American music by Piston and William Schuman. And from the guests a white hot Sibelius 2 with Schippers and an Elizabethan Suite by – and under – John Barbirolli. I learned all the first desk names of the orchestra, I knew Irwing Firth from his inimitable battery, Berj Zamkochian from his dexterity and verve in both Saint-Saens Organ Symphony and Poulenc’s Organ Conerto, Roger Voisin for his clear and sometimes overenthusiastic trumpet, James Stagliano from his lusty horn, their leader Richard Burgin in various solos often doubling as a conductor, Joseph de Pasquale as soloist in Harold and Richard Mayes for many delectable cello solos.

I bought as many records of Boston/Munch I could lay hands on. Yet at some point, Pierre refused to mail any more CDs to Greece. Was it the mailing cost? Was it that once or twice I asked for a replacement for a jitterish copy? I never knew. He wrote me that henceforth he would only ship his goods to (civilized) countries like the US and Japan – fulstop. The fact is I now had to do without his digitizations; ergo I had to try do them myself. And so it all started. Took me over three years and I did twice the catalogue you see at the site as “Under preparation” plus the ones already available – first overenthusiastically taking out all noise, the second time leaving some and the third (there was a third for many of my compilations) as I had to universally apply my patent for the mono recordings to become true mono. And now we are ready to sail.

Offering the digitizations to the public for me is not so much a commercial enterprise as it is the joy of the collector to share with others his love for the material at hand. This is the way I see it. And being a collector – it couldn’t have been different.

The Emil Passani mystery

As I was searching various links in the Internet, I stumbled on the Berlioz Page of a fan, Mr.Matthew B. Tepper. Berliozeans should visit the site he's set with commendable erudition. On the article he devotes to the Requiem discography you will notice he mentions enthusiastically the Fournet recording. He apparently has inside information about the forces involved, which then should not be the "Orchestre et Chorale Emil Passani" but the Grand Orchestra of Radio-Paris and the Emile Passani Choir. Yet the French Columbia label of the LP reissue doesn't mention this. A mystery. Buyers of this transfer should not worry very much. But it is good to know. Truth to tell an "Emil Passani" orchestra has never been mentioned anywhere ever - as far as I can tell.

Brands and trends

When the LP started, vinyl was real good. The best preserved in my collection are early 50s and 60s LPs. Later things went awry at production plants. Companies needed more copies, more profits - quality dropped till it became a nightmare. You'd never ever come across a "dished" LP during the 50s and 60s unless you really treated it so badly it could become it. But late 60s and 70s they came "factory-dished", all wrapped up in their "protective" celluloid panties, sealed and all. Protect against what? The damage was done in the factory.

The first signs of the big crisis came with the deletion catalogues. Records that didn't sell what the companies thought they should succumbed to the axe. Later some cheaper reissues started coming along. The public demanded certain numbers to be reinstated. Many did. More didn't. And then came the CD revolution. And with it a new lease of life for recordings once thought lost forever. People were crazed with dBs, with no noise, no clicks and pops - demanded highest fidelity and thought a mono recording an anathema. Who cared? And yet, it came that CD made almost the entire back catalogue surface again. Be it by the rights-owning companies themselves, be it by thirds that loaned the masters and published under license, be it bootlegs or private reissuers of forgotten LPs, it cannot be denied that digital brought back recordings that would have never appeared again on vinyl.

Purists complained of course. Vinyl was god, sacrosanct for the happy few who could afford the exorbitant prices prime vinyl issues are sold today and the high cost of quality playback components. But not only high-enders raved. Everyone did – it became a trend: Oh! the sweetness of vinyl, the naturalness of the sound, the pure harmonics. You never knew whether they couldn't hear all this on CD or if it was the surface noise, the tape hiss and the ubiquitous clicks that gave them their kicks. I still don't know which.

Then SACD and 20-bit processing tamed some of the purists. "Vinyl" quality sound they said. Maybe so. But companies took their ounce of flesh: prices are steep for these goodies and who can re-upgrade to SACD players or hybrids?

But assuming you pay the price, let's look at the CD today. The last 10 years there’s a surging wave of reissues of old recordings. And a huge market for them. So why? Why turning to the past, when all-new, brand-new recordings, in surround, in 20-bit, in realistic, amazing sound are available? Want a clue? I have one. Recording is nearing perfection. But recorded artists... far from it. Do you want a Beethoven cycle by sir Simon Rattle and the BPO? The Gramophone does. Do you? No, thanks. I'd be much much happier to have as my n-th Beethoven cycle the Naxos Weingartner. Really. Ever heard any of the series? Do. You are in for a life enhancing experience and a big surprise: how modern is classical.

I'll be back on the subject perhaps later.

Avis au lecteur

Mind, this is not my mother language. You must have guessed. I write in it 'cause I have to. My mother language would be Greek to you; so I had to chose yours which isn't Greek to me, being Greek. Heh heh heh. Perplexing? Maybe. I note it because you shall have to bear with my mistakes, my orthograph (which is Greek for all of you too ;)) and awkward syntax. Although truth to tell I have visited too many angloamerican chat rooms by now to know that these issues are no longer important; and that sometimes, as G.B.Shaw said, English is spoken much better by... Hungarians. Right? So never mind that sloppy English here. Just go to the gist of the meaning. Easy.

Starting a blog

Thought i'd better do this. Here there'll be rants & musings, musical both (some perhaps not), about the LPs I decided to digitalize; and how and why. About tem and me. About losing some gaining some - in CD format. About how dearly does one love these inanimate but so lively objects. About collecting. About recording and recordings. And recording artists. About companies and their policies, the tastes of the public and the trends in production. All in good time. For now I close the prologue and later I shall come back for the first movement exposition. See you folks.