An Ear for Music

by JOHN M. CONLY

SOMETHING epochal happened in 1950: Arturo Toscanini took an interest in making phonograph records.

This was probably of more symbolic than practical importance. Toscanini is eighty-three; and for the last thirty of the fifty-four years since Emile Berliner invented disk records, the maestro has been putting music on them with some regularity. However, it is no secret in the trade that he has regarded them at best as an evil economic necessity. And his chief concern, when recording, was that, he should have veto power over releasing the result.

The news of Toscanini’s change of heart was happily revealed (within earshot of the maestro, who made no demur) by an NBC official, at the end of the NBC Symphony’s spring tour. It came as reinforcement of a promise that next year should see the issuance of something long awaited — a Toscanini Beethoven Ninth Symphony. Toscanini has recorded, but vetoed, many Ninths. This time, presumably, he intended to get down to business, to keep on playing, recording, listening, and replaying until he had something too good to veto. (Meanwhile, perhaps as a trial run, he was going to record Verdi’s Requiem during his summer session at La Scala, Milan.)

Thereafter, the NBC man was too absorbed in “leaking” data on other, late summer-early fall Toscanini releases (Smetana’s The Moldau, for instance) to divulge an explanation of the maestro’s change of feeling — if, indeed, he knew any.

In lieu of inside information, it may plausibly be assumed that what converted the Great Man were the developments that have turned the recording industry practically inside out in the last two arid a half years. These would reach him in two ways: the studio chore of recording music, with its invariable editing and patching, has become vastly easier than it used to be; and the end product is really recognizable music, not a ghostly, rasping mockery of it.

The first of these effects comes about through the studio use of tape recording, the second through the development of high-fidelity phono pickups, amplifiers, and speakers — and through microgroove recording, better known (now with RCA Victor’s graceful approval) as LB. It was this last which really touched off the revolution.

A bare three years back, even an avid record enthusiast scarcely needed to risk his neck (angling it to scan the album titles on the shelves) more than once a month to keep abreast of new releases. When he spied one he had been waiting for, it took him only a few moments in a booth to confirm or blast his anticipation. Then he relinquished (or not, as the case may be) about $8.75 and took himself thence.

Now things are different, at least in metropolitan record shops. For one thing, the customer’s visits are likelier to be weekly than monthly. Even so, when he enters, there is shoved at him an almost paralyzing stack of aesthetically colorful cardboard envelopes, each containing an attested fifty minutes of music, received since his last visit. Thumbing through them, he encounters three Haydn symphonies, a Vaughan Williams quartet, a Beethoven wind octet never before recorded, a MoussorgskY song cycle, some Baroque serenades, a complete Cuban opera conducted by the composer, a Mozart mass, a Bruckner mass, two Haydn masses, a Beethoven mass, two Strauss tone poems, a Messiaen tone poem, a Hindemith tone poem, some ancient Basque folk songs, and a complete history of World War II, newscast by newscast. (In nonmetropolitan shops the process is more frustrating but less embarrassing, since the victim gets at least half the list in the shape of unsubstantiated release announcements, about which he can’t be expected to do anything immediate.)

Looking at the makers’ labels is no help at all. There are, of course, the old stand-by’s—Victor, Columbia, Vox, Mercury, Capitol, London, Decca. But the bulk of the stack bears utterly unfamiliar names like Relax, Elite, Renaissance, Period, Dial, REB, Paradox, Rondo, and Griffon.

The fantastic fact is, there are better than fifty companies, at this writing, making LP’s — and mostly only LP’s.

Because vinylite LP’s are tough, many a music shop will let a customer return one if he doesn’t like it. This, in turn, encourages him to try unfamiliar music — a concerto grosso, perhaps, by Giovanni Sammartini, Gluck’s teacher, instead of the Cesar Franck symphony. Here is what gladdens the small record maker, for the Sammartini concerto can be played — and well played — by a chamber orchestra in Vienna for about the fee James C. Petrillo wants for thirty minutes of a U.S. musician’s time. It can be taped on the spot, edited (with scissors, like film and unlike the wax master-disks of yore), and shipped back to America in a tin can. Thereafter, a big recording company will print it on vinylite for the small entrepreneur at a cost of something like $1.50 a record — labels, art, text, envelopes and all. As one New York LP maker says: Sell only 1000 copies and you still clear a nice profit.

The pleasant thing is that — strictly for the nonce — the big companies seem to view this rather benignly. The public is so voracious for LP’s that nobody is crowding anybody, and meanwhile the staff can get around and have a little fun. While RCA was shepherding Toscanini home from his tour, a Columbia crew was junketing toward Prades, France. There Pablo Casals, the good gray cellist who has renounced concert tours as long as Franco rules Spain, was serving as focal point of a pilgrimage of instrumental virtuosi from all over the world, bent on joining him in a Bach bicentennial festival. What Columbia expected to reap was hard to figure, for the festival’s high points were to be performances of the six Brandenburg concerti (which Columbia had just released in excellent playings by Fritz Reiner and the Pittsburgh Symphony) and the suites for solo cello (which Casals himself had recorded earlier this year for another label, the Bach Society). But tape recorders are portable, and LP’s are cheap enough so that even duplication is no sin.

At any rate, that kind of duplication is no sin. The duplication which grays the hair of small LP makers is the duplication by big outfits of LP releases on 78-revolutions-per-minute (the old “standard” speed) records. They’re afraid it may stop.

When it does, the big manufacturers may see fit to pull out the props under the current $4.85-$5.95 list prices of LP’s, already weakened by drastic discount wars among retailers in some cities. Thereupon may vanish the “ nice profit ” of the small operator.

On the other hand, at midsummer no manufacturer seemed to be planning any hasty pricecutting. George Mendelssohn, the shrewd proprietor of Vox records (a middlesized or six-figure outfit, which easily weathered the change from 78’s to all-LP) was sanguine as he left for Vienna to hire two more soloists and record Bach’s St. John Passion. There is no reason for anyone to cut prices, he thinks, in the near future — certainly not until after the coming winter’s busy season. At present prices, people are buying as quickly as they familiarize themselves with the new music available. (He is focusing on music not too unfamiliar, at least in idiom: Schubert’s E-flat mass; Monteverde’s Orfeo; Mozart’s Coronation concerto.)

Then there are specialized LP companies who don’t care a hang whether anyone else cuts prices or not. One such is Ross Russell, otherwise known as Dial Records, whose motto is: “Stay out of the way of the larger firms. Better yet, stay ahead of them.”Russell, originally proprietor of a Hollywood music shop specializing in Dixieland jazz, got ahead of them in the post-war years, when they failed to appreciate the phenomenon called bop. Now, although he is still in the bop business, with an LP featuring the saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker, sometimes called the “greatest bopper of them all,”he is ahead of them again with such serious modernists of the twelve-tone school as Schönberg and Alban Berg. A goodly stable of this music’s foremost exponents record almost exclusively for the ex-Dixielander, who isn’t a hit worried.

Like many of the small LP makers tinctured with crusading spirit, Russell is quite sure some of his records are the best there are, a pair of current favorites being Stravinsky’s chamber opera, Renard, and his opera bouffe, Mavra. A New York competitor, Elaine Music Shop, makes even more fervent claims for another ultramodern work, Edgar Varese’s lonization, written for three dozen percussion instruments. This is cautiously described as “the most, sensational record ever made.”

So it may be. However, oddly enough, the almost undisputed composer-hero of the LP saga thus far is a very unsensational old gentleman dead a century and a half. Franz Josef Haydn, after years of neglect, is clicking like a castanet. One month alone has seen eight Haydn symphonies issued on LP’s; another, two masses. The Creation is available (and a good job, too) for the first time in twenty-five years of electrical recording. People are learning that Haydn wrote quartets other than the Emperor, and other symphonies just as fetching as the Clock and the Surprise— notably, for instance, the delightful Bear, No. 82, in C.

Credit for a good deal of the Father of the Symphony ‘s sudden vogue belongs to a two-headed, dual-natured organization called the Haydn Society. It describes itself as an “ordinary business venture" which yet “falls into an eleemosynary category.” By this it means it is dedicated primarily to getting just and long-overdue recognition for Papa Haydn, but is pretty sure it can make some useful LP money at the same time, as indeed it does. Its musicologists (it is also the foremost publisher of Haydn scores) and American engineering staff are headquartered in Vienna, its business offices in Boston. Occasionally it ventures into the works of composers influenced by Haydn (it has done Mozart’s Coronation mass), but promises to stay safely on the far side of Barlok and Stravinsky.

A neighbor and competitor of the Haydn Society is a new but ivy-clad LP maker called Harvard University, which has entered the field with a Lowell House Musical Society performance of Handel’s opera Acis and Galatea, Some commercial record makers might dismiss this effort as amateurish. But others seem to strive purposely for a similar informal, up-close, intimate atmosphere, which comes very attractively off noiseless LP surfaces.

A good example is the Bach Coffee Cantata made recently by Allegro Records. Allegro’s head man, Paul Puner (who once helped run Musicraft), has just invested a very substantial sum in a disk-culling and printing plant of his own. He contends, and with some reason, that musical and engineering know-how are kept too far apart in big-company operations. He wants to blend them, on the theory that much heretofore unexploited music was virtually made to order for the new techniques. He is willing to bet, accordingly, on Henry Purcell, who had the foresight, in the late 1600s, to write some of the world’s most entrancing music to intelligible English words and for small groups of singers and instrumentalists. Purcell’s little operas, King Arthur and The Fairy Queen, and a collect ion of his songs, performed by John Brownlee, have been occupying Mr. Puner much of the summer.

Granted that these works have irresistible charm, one problem of Puner’s and of his fellow pioneers still remains unsolved: How is the public to be nudged into trying them? Not even the hardiest record shopper, these days, can spend enough time in listening booths to sample the whole output of LP’s. Nor can any newspaper or magazine critic keep up with it.

In some stores, knowledgeable record clerks fill the breach. But, as one New York music shop wails, an unprecedented spread of the discount disease is wrecking wage budgets and squeezing truly knowledgeable clerks out of jobs. A real help is the monthly record supplement issued, at $1 a year, by the Gramophone Shop, Inc., 18 East 48th Street, New York, which contains very sound, unbiased, thumbnail reviews of nearly all classical records published, both domestic and foreign, mierogroove and 78 r.p.m. Another solution, with which sundry record shops have been flirting since the LP flood began, might be rental record libraries. LP’s don’t break and they can be cleaned safely with a damp cloth. Such items as Decea’s complete transcriptions of Broadway plays like The Cocktail Party and Death of a Salesman would, beyond any doubt, pay back their purchase price to any library in jig time. And many a music lover who might boggle al buying, unheard and for $5.95, an unfamiliar work like Heinrich Schütz’s Christmas oratorio might jump at the chance to take it home with him for the week-end for 50 cents. By Monday morning, he might want to keep it.

Despite the onrush of LP, there still are neglected areas in commercial catalogues — and musical gadgeters to view them as a challenge.

It may be a surprise to some record collectors to hear, for example, that there exist excellent recordings of two “missing” works. One is Beethoven’s great B-flat major quartet, opus 130, played in its original version, with the Great Fugue as final movement. The other is Schubert’s captivating Symphony No. 6(theobvious source, incidentally, for much of Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony, despite anecdotes invoking Mozart).

The catch is, these records are not available to the public. They are the prized private property of a couple of ingenious East Coast music fiends, to be nameless here except as Fiend A and Fiend B, who had a friend with a good FM receiver and tape recorder and a felicitous location within easy EM range of the Library of Congress and the National Gallery of Art.

In the winter of 1948-1949 the Library, jointly with a local “good music” station, broadcast a Beethoven cycle played flawlessly by the Budapest Quartet. The night the Bflat major was performed, Fiend A and his friend hooked the (win leads of the FM tuner to ihe tape recorder, a $.500 high-fidelity job. Then they monitored the broadcast via the loudspeaker.

Next day, Fiend A took the tape to a commercial recording studio. His cheapest course, he found, was to have the quartet transcribed on slowplaying (33⅓ r.p.m.) but standard groove records. It cost him $10.

Fiend B, a year later, went through the same procedure to record the Schubert symphony, zestfully played by Richard Bales and the National Gallery Orchestra, sponsored by the Gallery and the American Federation of Musicians, and expertly microphoned by a coop FM station. Owing to the lapse of a year. Fiend B had much less explaining to do at the studio.

The staff there even took the initiative, asking him if he represented a “club.” If he did, the club could have an LP master-disk cut (the LP process is not recommended for instantaneous recording; microgrooves in acetate don’t stand up well) for about $40, and vinylites printed from it at $2 a disk. If the club had twelve members, each would pay about $5.30 for his 12-inch LP.

Fiend B had no club - but if he had, there is no reason its LP’s couldn’t have been as good as anyone’s. Such engineering developments as Columbia’s “hot stylus” master-recording technique, which yields wonderfully quiet, accurately cut grooves, are now in wide use. This has largely solved the trebledroop hazard which used to plague LP makers (the nearer the cutting stylus got to the center of the record, the fewer high tones it recorded). Nevertheless, it still is a good idea, when having an LP master cut, to have the studio guarantee the result.

Also, it is astute to keep any club activities clear of the taint of profit. The American Federation of Musicians, which derives royalties from commercial recordings, and the Music Publishers′ Protective Association, which oversees mechanical reproduction, regard unlicensed record-making for profit much as the FBI views amateur experiments in nuclear fission.

Often excellent recordings are issued only to be lost in the publicity shuffle; others’ acclaim dies down too soon. Mentioned here are a few which might fall in one of these two categories:—

Bach: Concerto No. 1 in D Minor (Frank Pelleg, harpsichord, and Israel Philharmonic; 12″ LP; Period SPL 509). Performed, at last, on the proper instrument, adequately recorded.

Bach: St. Matthew Passion (soloists and choruses of the Berlin Radio and St. Hedwig’s Cathedral, Fritz Lehmann conducting; lour 12″ LP’s; Polydor-Vox PL 6070). Best reasonably priced version of this vast work. Highly satisfactory throughout.

Beethoven: Mass in C Major, Op. 86 (not the Missa Solemnis; Vienna Symphony Orchestra and Akademie Kammerehor, Rudolf Moralt conducting; 12″ LP; Polydor-Vox PL 6300). First recording; excellent job throughout.

Beethoven: Egmont — Incidental Music, Op. 84 (Soloists and Würl - temberg State Orchestra, Ferdinand Leitner conducting; four 12″ 78’s; Deutsche Grammophon DGS 32). Klarchen’s wonderful song, Die Trommel gerührt, by itself excuses the high price. Recording: adequate.

Brahms: Sonatas No. 1 in F Minor‚ No. 2 in E-flat Major, Op. 120, for Clarinet and Piano (Reginald Kell and Mieczyslaw Horszowski; 12″ LP; Mercury MG 10016). Ideal blend of players and music. Recording: good.

Kathleen Ferrier Album (British folk songs— Blow the Wind Southerly; Sully Carden; Keel Row; etc.; piano by Phyllis Spurrier; three 10″ 78’s; London LA 95). Irresistible performance by one of today′ s finest contraltos. Recording: superb.

Mozart: Serenade No. 9 in D, “Posthorn” (Vienna State Opera Orchestra, Jonathan Sternberg conducting; 12″ LP; Haydn Society HSLP 1012). Exemplary small-orchestra performance. Recording: excellent.

Offenbach: Tales of Hoffman (Andre Cluytens, Opera Comique of Paris; three 12″ LP’s or sixteen 12″ 78’s; Columbia SL 106 or CMOP 31). Crisp, crystal-clear, very French production, perhaps best LP opera yet.

Puccini: Gianni Schicchi (Alfredo Simonetti, Italian cast, and Radio Italy Orchestra; with English libretto; 12″ LP; Cetra-Soria’ CS 50028). Forty-five minutes of fine Italian ham. Recording: good.

Rameau: Les Indes Galantes (excerpts, early opera ballet; soloists, Yvonne Gouverne chorus and chamber orchestra. Maurice Hewitt conducting; 12″ LP; Discophiles Fran(ais-Vox DL 6080). Charming is the only word. Recording: transcribed from older 78’s, but not bad.

Respighi: Fountains of Rome (Orchestra of the Augusteo, Rome, Victor de Sabata conducting; 12″ LP; two 12″ 78’s or two 45’s; Victor LM 1057; WDM 1337; DM 1337. LP has Debussy’s Jeux, same performers, on other side). A veritable revelation. Recording: excellent.

Sibelius: Symphony No. 5 in Eflat Major (London Philharmonic, Erich Leinsdorf conducting; four 12″ 78’s; London LA 142). Makes predecessors sound feeble. Recording: brilliant.

Villa-Lobos: Cboros No. 10 (Los Angeles Oratorio Society and orchestra. Werner Janssen conducting; 10″ LP or two 12 78′s; Capitol CLP 8043 and EBL 8042; LP includes as filler the captivating toccata Little Trainof the Caipira, also available as 78 single). Infectious, quasi-primitive chant-effects, well handled. Recording: fair.

Weill: Lost in the Stars (original New York cast; 12” LP; Decca DLP 8028). Like Porgy and Bess — also in that it has Todd Duncan — this probably is going to outgrow the “ Broadway musical” designation and endure as music.