A Fantastique revived

I have a thing about those "lesser" names. True, discography spoils the minds of music lovers: we sometimes think like "he's not on CD, so he's not at all". And yet how many great artists were studio-shy, not to mention men like Mitropoulos and Celibidache who enjoyed only live music making, on the podium, with people attending the event, or Volkmar Andre who definitely hated recording (and recordings) calling them "canned music". Well Golschmann wasn't either studio-shy or snubbed recording. And he made quite a few in his time, chiefly when he became permanent principal conductor of the St Louis SO. Very active when still in his native Paris he did not became more "provincialized" staying for over 25 years in Saint Louis; instead he toured the world and got side-work all around it. Why the "lesser" names prologue then? Because somehow I had pigeon-holed Vladimir Golschmann as one of them ... when all his recordings I have prove quite the opposite. This Fantastique was done in Vienna and I hadn't listened to it for ages. I did recently and although I must say I've heard till now a surfeit of Fantastiques, this one bowled me over. And being so well recorder too! The decision to make a transfer was taken on the spot.

Now the bed-fellow I chose for this Berlioz, was another rarity. Franz Litschauer must have recorded the Trittico Botticelliano for the first time on LP. This was an original American Vanguard, pressed on noble and pure vinyl which withstood the passage of six decades and an assortment of not always very gentle styluses. A miracle! And what a lively recording it was. I had actually to tune it down to match the sonics of the Golschmann, otherwise the stereo Fantastique would sound almost dated by the side of this effervescent sound. I hope everybody enjoys this as much as the Berlioz. Of course Respighi wasn't betting on the right horse. Both Mussorgsky and Reger saw that their picture-to-sound metaphors were in their own advantage, basically dealing with rather second tier painters (only Ravel seems to have elevated the trite pictures of that exhibition to Chagall level!) Respighi chose Botticelli - at his own risk: his work in fact appears less poetic and colorful than the paintings from which it draws inspiration. His Botticelli is more a Pre-Raphaelite study on the Italian master than a reproduction of the original. No matter; he remains a great orchestrator and the artists involved in this recording made him proud. MSE Processing makes this a very balanced CD from the sound point of view.