Today, a few miscellaneous items and recommendations. A few weeks back while discussing Andrew Litton’s recent BIS recording of Prokofiev’s Sixth Symphony with the Bergen Philharmonic, I lamented the current unavailability in any format of Eugene Ormandy’s old Columbia recording of the piece with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Litton’s account is very good, as are others by conductors like Jarvi, Weller and, especially, Mravinsky, but it was Ormandy who best traced the link between Prokofiev’s gift for long-lined, heartbreaker themes — those in the first two movements of this symphony, for example — and the achievement of Russian Romantic composers like Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov.
In searching for a CD version of that 1960s release I checked a few Amazon sites, where I turned up plenty of used copies of the old LP, but no CDs or digital transfers. Then a reader pointed out that I hadn’t pushed my Amazon search far enough. On Japan Amazon — nowadays the most informed and reliable curator of the Western recorded musical heritage — it lists a three-CD Japanese Sony set that includes not only a carefully remastered version of the Sixth Symphony, but also Ormandy’s Columbia recordings of the First, Fourth (best ever recorded performance of the revised edition), Fifth, and Seventh symphonies, as well as the Love For Three Oranges and Lieutenant Kije suites.
The selection is not pure gold. Ormandy’s Fifth is very good but will not make you forget the recordings by Karajan or Koussevitzky, and Malko is still the man for the First (a tie with Koussevitzky) and Seventh symphonies (by a narrow margin in the case of the Seventh; Ormandy’s elegant monaural recording was made shortly after the piece was composed). But the Fourth and Sixth, the latter arguably the greatest of Prokofiev’s symphonies, are here in interpretations that belong at or near the top of the list.
This revelation about a Japan-only transfer of the Prokofiev Sixth sent me digging further into the matter via Google, where it was revealed that there also exists an American transfer of the same performance, available as a listing in the treasure trove catalogue of a company called Haydn House (www.HaydnHouse.com). Not surprisingly, Haydn House specialises in reprints of complete recordings of the Haydn symphonies by conductors like Max Goberman, Leslie Jones and Ernst Maerzendorfer, and there is a sub-label called Organ Loft that offers a huge catalogue of resurrected organ recordings that should set any devotee of that instrument adrool.
But the part of the site that really hijacked my attention was the 22-page catalogue of restored classical recordings, packed with revered but otherwise unavailable interpretations of music from every era. Long-time collectors will recognise gems from the archives of many labels, including once-beloved but long-gone ones like Westminster. It was on these pages that I found and ordered another transfer of the Ormandy Prokofiev Sixth, this time paired with Marian Anderson’s legendary recording of Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody (from an RCA Victor disc). Wilfrid Biscaye-Pryckre’s 2007 remastering of the Prokofiev yields nothing to the Japanese Sony release, and it’s clear that he did whatever could be done with the thin monaural sound of the Brahms performance.
Haydn House also offers a CD transfer of another Columbia disc that I had been seeking for years, E. Power Biggs’s performances of Hindemith’s three organ sonatas, taken from the original 1960s LP and without a trace of surface noise. The first sonata is especially haunting, the Massig Schnell first movement featuring one of those indelible, slightly eerie melodies that Hindemith was creating in the early 1920s (the op. 22 String Quartet is full of them). The sound of the Flentrop organ at Yale, on which Biggs performs the sonatas, is perfect for these works, and the recording captures it very well.
None of the performances mentioned above are available as a legitimate download, as far as I know. For music that can be downloaded, and that category is quickly coming to include most of it, it is good to be cautious even when buying it from the most well-established vendors. Even iTunes, perhaps the most widely used of all legitimate music download sites, screws up badly at times.
Classical listeners may have noticed that Daniel-Ben Pienaar’s recent, compete recording of Books I and II of J.S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier is being sold at the super-low price of US$15.99 (515 baht). Hard-driven and hyperthyroidal though his performances of the preludes and fugues may be at times, the set is still a steal compared with, say, Angela Hewitt’s, which costs US$39.99. But steer clear.
Apple has been surprisingly sloppy with the transfer. Preludes and fugues from Book I are sometimes missing, replaced by the pieces in the same key from Book II. Then, when you listen to Book II, you get them again. I first noticed this problem when I listened to the Prelude and Fugue No.6 In D minor from Book I, and heard the piece in the same key from Book II instead. Later I found others. I wrote to Apple about the mistake, and they returned my money but left the download as it was, and it remains uncorrected as of this writing. The offer looks like a bargain, but spend more and choose another version if you are in the market for a digital download of this music.
And speaking of downloads, there are some marvels available in high-resolution FLAC format from eclassical.com now. Tenebrae, a Gesualdo-inspired composition by the British composer John Pickard, is among the most compelling and powerful new orchestral works that I have heard in recent years. It is available as a stunning, 24-bit FLAC download, and also as a multichannel CD, paired with an earlier orchestral piece called Sea Change and his jazz-inflected Piano Concerto, the most of its kind since those by Ravel and Gershwin. As with the Ravel, the two rambunctious outer movements frame a sombre and dark-toned one, a passacaglia here, that contains the work’s ruminative heart.
Also well worth investing in is a new recording of Thomas Ades’s Violin Concerto (Concentric Paths) and Three Studies from Couperin, with Peter Herresthal as soloist in the concerto and the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra conducted by Andrew Manze, usually an early music specialist but here doing wonders with scores that appealed to me far less in the composer’s own recordings on EMI. The transfer sounds terrific, and is a great bargain at US$8.20 for the highest-res FLAC.
