They Shall Have Music

An ancient and presumably apocryphal story helps to illustrate a rather strange phenomenon now taking place in the record industry. The joke has to do with the father of a juvenile delinquent from New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, who, suddenly falling heir to a fortune, decides to take his son to England, there to be instructed in the niceties of the mother tongue by an Oxford don. At the end of the stipulated period, the parent returns to find that his son has indeed lost his New York accent and replaced it with a near-Churchillian perfection of speech. Overjoyed, he turns to thank the Oxonian and asks him how he ever accomplished this miracle. “Aw,” replies the professor, “it was nuttinh Youse soitinly couldn’t ask fer a better student.”

Something of this exchange of accents seems to be going on among record producers. A small label named Command Records, which came out of nowhere two years ago to revolutionize the popular-record industry with a series of stereo discs called “Persuasive Percussion,” has signed up the Pittsburgh Symphony and other orchestras and plunged into the classical business. And London Records, the Oxonian among record producers, has diverted some of its fanfare from Ansermet and Tebaldi and even Mantovani to concentrate on a series of superstereo pops called the “phase 4 stereo” series.

The man who started the big shift — with results no less astonishing to him than to the rest of the industry — is a 55-year-old, gray-haired, mild-mannered former band leader named Enoch Light, the president of Command. In the late 1930s and 1940s, Light directed a popular band called, not unpredictably, the Light Brigade. It never quite hit the Goodman-Dorsey level, but it played restaurants, night clubs, and theaters, did well on the college circuit, and in its heyday was one of the bestknown jazz bands in the country.

More recently, Light had been doing moderately well as an independent record producer, when, late in 1959, he suddenly put out two stereo discs of popular music called Persuasive Percussion and Provocative Percussion. One of these listed him as the leader; the other listed a drummer named Terry Snyder. The results were overwhelming. Both records began a sales march which has been unabated for two years (each is now well into the hundreds of thousands), and both were followed by a steady stream of successors, some issued by Light himself, but most put out by other labels, big as well as small, eager to cash in on what quite obviously was a Trend.

In recording His Percussion series, Light had rediscovered one of the basic principles of stereo — that with two channels of sound playing through two speakers you can get a good deal of side-to-side separation. This is what is known in the trade, usually with considerable disdain, as the ping-pong or hole-in-the-middle effect. But Light did not despise it; he built it into a million-dollar business, utilizing side-to-side stereo to bring new life, motion, and a sense of fancifulness to popular tunes. “His stereo has a hole in the middle you can drive a truck through,” says one competitor, not without a trace of bitterness, “but that’s what the public seems to want.”

When it comes to his new classical line, however, Light has turned away from side-to-side stereo and gone back to the basic American precept of watching the doughnut and not the hole.

“We’re trying to create excitement in symphonic music,” he explained a few weeks ago, “and we’d like to make the same kind of breakthrough in stereo that we made in popular music. But you can’t do it the same way. You don’t play tricks with the Pittsburgh Symphony.”

But even if gimmickry is out, Light will admit — without too much prompting — that the Command Classics are recorded and manufactured by novel and specialized techniques. Foremost among these is the use in the recording process of 35millimeter magnetic film rather than the customary half-inch tape. Each Command record bears, prominently displayed on its elaborate packaging, a list of eight reasons why 35millimeter film is superior to any other recording medium ever devised by mankind in its long and inventive history. This reviewer has only the mildest of interest in whether music is recorded on film, tape, or spaghetti strands prior to its transfer to discs; he can, however, report that the new Command records have a rich, open, and well-textured sound and are notably free of distortion.

Light is getting his classical program under way with five records, two from Pittsburgh, three from Paris. He has signed the Pittsburgh Symphony and its conductor, William Steinberg, to an exclusive contract, not in itself a Herculean task, since previous agreements between the orchestra and the Capitol and Everest labels had terminated. The Pittsburgh is not one of the four or five top-notch orchestras in the land, but a pretty good case can be made for it as number six or seven, and in Steinberg it has a well-skilled, wellschooled conductor with an admirable musical intelligence and a touch of personal flair. The first two Command-Pittsburgh products are Brahms’s Symphony No. 2 in D and Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2 in E, and anyone who finds this kind of repertory too unadventurous had better look elsewhere, for it is what Mr. Light intends to produce.

“We’re sticking to the standards,” he says firmly. “No esoterics.”

To record the Pittsburgh Symphony the way he wanted to, Light took it out of its home ground, a building called Syria Mosque. “I don’t want to cast any aspersions on Syria Mosque,” he says diplomatically. “It’s a fine place for concerts. But it’s a long and narrow auditorium, with the stage across the narrow width. We couldn’t get the spread-out effect we wanted there. So I found an old auditorium called the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial — a big square hall with a very high ceiling. It was just perfect, and it had never been used for recording before.”

When he began to make records in Paris, where he hired both the Colonne and Conservatoire orchestras, Light chose the Salle Wagram, a sports arena and meeting hall near the Étoile, for his sessions. Here, too, recording had not previously been done — an oversight, Light thinks, since the Salle’s wooden walls provide excellent resonance for stereo.

Listening to the first live Command classics, one is likely to conclude that even if Light has not yet attained the sonic millennium, he has made good on his promise to provide stereo that is arresting and exciting, and he has done it without tricks or tampering.

The standout of the set is a gorgeous recording of Brahms’s Second by Steinberg and the Pittsburgh Symphony. The sheen of the Pittsburgh may not be that of the Philadelphia, but it has a rugged strength and character of its own, which come through admirably in Steinberg’s heart-of-the-matter type of conducting. The performance abounds in spirit and songfulness; the sound sets off the different instrumental choirs in perfect proportion and depth.

Even more unusual in a recording that stresses sound is the avoidance of extreme peaks in dynamic range. The pianos are always clearly audible without the volume’s being turned up, and the fortes are perfectly comfortable without its being turned down. There is no need to hasten back and forth to the dial as the composer’s pulse beat rises and falls — which is a claim not all recordings can make.

A similar naturalness pervades the sound of Command’s recordings made in Paris. These include Moussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, played by the Conservatoire under Andre Vandernoot, a young Belgian; Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe Suite No. 2, by Pierre Dervaux and the Colonne, with La Valse and Alborada del Gracioso on the reverse; and a third record coupling Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio Espagnol and Tchaikovsky’s Capriccio Italien — the former led by Vandernoot, the latter by Dervaux.

Despite its admirable sound, Vandernoot’s Pictures at an Exhibition tails well short of the grandeur of a halfdozen other versions of this muchrecorded work. But the two capriccios, which rely for their eflect more on tonal impact than any great richness of musical content, make quite a splash. Here, if anywhere, the temptation to resort to gimmickry must have been powerful, for both works are highly, not to say persuasively, percussive. But a normal left-to-right balance is maintained, and the sonic fireworks are supplied entirely by Tchaikovsky and Rimsky. The conductors seem content almost to let the music play itself rather than to imbue it with any particular snap or sparkle. As for Dervaux’s Daphnis and Chloe, it lacks something of the subtlety ol Charles Munch’s recent Victor recording and something of the finesse of Leonard Bernstein’s equally recent Columbia one. But the sound, once again, is magnificent, and Dervaux rises to it by providing a dramatic performance that fairly seethes with color and vibrancy.

However his classical line is received, Light naturally has no intention of giving up or even curtailing his Command popular operations. Furthermore, while he will admit that no live jazz band ever sounded quite like a “Persuasive Percussion” record, he insists that something more than mere gimmickry is involved in the success of his popular discs.

“There’s good music on them,” he says. “We’re careful about what we play, and how we play it. In two years we’ve put out only twentysix Command records. Why, some companies put out twenty-six records a month. Every one of our records has sold over 100,000 copies, and a couple have hit 500,000. This isn’t a gimmick line; it’s a music line. That’s why every one of our imitators is dying.”

Alleged mortality rates aside, there is no doubt that Command’s percussion has had a persuasive effect on the rest of the industry, including the big companies. RCA Victor, for example, is attempting to surpass Command with a “Stereo Action” line, in which the sound is not only sharply separated from speaker to speaker but actually undulates back and lorth across the gap between them.

The most unexpected compliment paid to Command so far probably is that of London, whose “ffrr” and “ffss” trademarks have long been symbolic of solid sound achievements in classical music, both monophonic and stereophonic. London has taken its turn at topping Light by issuing a series of twelve popular records, gathered under the cabalistic designation of “phase 4 stereo.” Most of these attempt to do what the Command discs do, with the difference that, while Light generally favors small and relatively restrained ensembles, London goes all out with big, brassy bands that roll toward the listener like an army of tanks.

One of the London series — by all odds the most spectacularly successful — actually is a re-creation of a military parade going by a reviewing stand. So complete is the illusion that the sound of one band coming in from the left is actually superimposed momentarily on the sound of another fading out to the right. The oohing and aahing of spectators, the whoosh of passing jets, and the shouted commands of drum majors all add to the general air of festivity, gaiety, and excitement.

Perhaps what is most remarkable about Pass in Review is that it represents a studio job from start to finish — that is, there were no paraders, no jets, no crowds. Instead, the various sounds, musical and nonmusical, were taped separately, then blended, mixed, combined, and edited together, with the climax furnished by a massed band of two hundred pieces thundering out Sousa’s The Stars and Stripes Forever — probably the most awesome moment since stereo was invented.

Record Reviews

Bach, Johann Sebastian: Organ Music

E. Power Biggs, organist; Columbia MS-6261 (stereo) and ML-5661

Mr. Biggs needs no encomiums at this late date. The distinction of this record is that it brings together in one handy place so many of the most famous and popular Bach organ pieces — the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, the Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor, the Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue in C Major, the Little Fugue in G Major, and the Fig Fugue in G Major — all played on the Flentrop organ in the Busch-Reisinger Museum of Harvard University by a master of his craft.

Dame Nellie Melba: Opera Arias and Songs

Nellie Melba, soprano, with piano accompaniment by London Ronald and orchestral accompaniment by anonymous orchestra; Angel COLH-125 (monaural)

Helen Porter Mitchell was born near Melbourne, Australia, in 1861, and died in Sydney in 1931. In that seventy-year span she had sung throughout the world under the name of Nellie Melba (from Melbourne), leaving an indelible impression upon those who heard her and a small legacy of recordings by which later generations could check the validity of their ancestors’ tastes. Judging from this collection of arias and songs recorded in London in 1904, 1905, and 1906, Melba’s contemporaries were justified in regarding her voice as uniquely fresh and silvery, unlike any other in the world. In these more than half-century-old recordings, scrubbed as clean as possible for inclusion in Angel’s “Great Recordings of the Century” series, Melba seems to float through the Faust Jewel Song, the Romeo and Juliette Valse, Tosti’s Good-by, and the Mad scenes from the Hamlets of Donizetti and Ambroise Thomas. These must have been superb recordings. Their age shows, but singing of this kind can triumph over even greater obstacles, and Angel’s record is convincing proof that Nellie’s contributions to human felicity extended well beyond peche Melba.

The Slightly Fabulous Limeliters

Lou Gottlieb, Alex Hassilev, and Glenn Yarbrough, folk singers, self-accompanied on banjo, guitar, and bass: RCA Victor LSP-2393 (stereo) and LPM-2393

Boisterous sophistication is the hallmark of the Limeliters, a trio from San Francisco who specialize in a kind of egghead vaudeville act that blends folk singing with social commentary. In this, their second record, the emphasis is more on the singing than the satire, with brisk and well-knit accounts of Western Wind, Hard Travelin’, and Whistling Gypsy, plus Israeli and Brazilian numbers. Television provides a launching platform for Gunslinger, a musical affirmation of the principle that “there’s no such thing as a bad cowpoke — only a sick one.” A good party record, certainly — even for a party of one.

Witness! (Dramatic Highlights of Congressional Investigations)

Produced by Bud Greenspan; narrated by H. V. Kaltenborn; with the voices of John F. Kennedy, Joseph McCarthy, Joseph Welch, Frank Costello, James Hoff-a, Casey Stengel, and others; Riverside 7513/14 {monaural): two records

Congressional investigations tend to get confusing at times, and this documentary devoted to their recent history is no model of organization. It skips from Dave Beck to the FI oilywood Ten to Alger Hiss to Howard Hughes to Jimmy HotTa, and back, eventually, to Beck, and it too often concentrates on the thrust and the parry without telling what the duel was about. But it is, nevertheless, fascinating to listen to, re-creating as it does the drama behind so many recent and not altogether forgotten headlines. This is particularly true of the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, to which producer Greenspan sensibly devotes an entire record — half the album. Here is Joe Welch telling Senator McCarthy: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness,” and many of the other dramatic exchanges of the proceedings, which somehow seem all the more dramatic carried by voices alone, without a television picture.