NGS-G+ - String Quartet No. 3 in F, Op 17, No. 3: 2nd movement, Allegro - Rubinstein NGS ACOUSTIC

NB. This recording was originally given away at the beginning of 1925 as a "Christmas gift" to members of the National Gramophonic Society. As such we do not believe it has ever been officially issued for sale, and in the light of this we intend to carry on the tradition by giving it away as both a high-quality, LAME-encoded MP3 and as a full CD-master quality FLAC lossless download.

Rubinstein

Anton Grigorevich Rubinstein (Russian: Антóн Григóрьевич Рубинштéйн), (November 28, 1829 – November 20, 1894) was a Russian pianist, composer and conductor. As a pianist he was regarded as a rival of Franz Liszt, and he ranks amongst the great keyboard virtuosos. He also founded the St. Petersburg Conservatory, which, together with Moscow Conservatory founded by his brother Nikolai Rubinstein, helped establish a reputation for musical skill among the subjects of the czar of Russia.

Rubinstein was a prolific composer, writing no less than twenty operas (notably Demon, written after Lermontov's Romantic poem), five piano concerti, six symphonies and a large number of solo piano works along with a substantial output of works for chamber ensemble, two concertos for cello and one for violin, free-standing orchestral works and tone poems (including one entitled Don Quixote).

Rubinstein and Mikhail Glinka, considered the first important Russian classical composer, had both studied in Berlin with pedagogue Sigfried Dehn. Glinka, as Dehn's student 12 years before Rubinstein, used the opportunity to amass greater reserves of compositional skill that he could use to open up a whole new territory of Russian music. Rubinstein, conversely, chose to exercise his compositional talents within the German styles illustrated in Dehn's teaching. Robert Schumann and Felix Mendelssohn were the strongest influences on Rubinstein's music.[49].

Consequently, Rubinstein's music demonstrates none of the nationalism of The Five. He spoke out against Russian nationalism, leading to arguments with Mily Balakirev and others who felt that his establishment of a Conservatory in St. Petersburg would damage Russian musical traditions. Nonetheless, it is Rubinstein's pupil Tchaikovsky who has become perhaps most popularly identified with Russian music.

Following Rubinstein's death, his works began to be ignored, although his piano concerti remained in the repertoire in Europe until the First World War, and his principal works have retained a toehold in the Russian concert repertoire. Perhaps somewhat lacking in individuality, Rubinstein's music was unable to compete either with the established classics or with the new Russian style of Stravinsky and Prokofiev.

Over recent years, his work has been performed a little more often both in Russia and abroad, and has often met with positive criticism. Amongst his better known works are the opera The Demon, his Piano Concerto No. 4, and his Symphony No. 2, known as The Ocean.

Notes from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Rubinstein

This Recording - Technical Assessment

Original surface quality: Initial signs were not brilliant - crackly and hissy, but actually not bad for a disc of this vintage and most certainly capable of resurrection

Other notes: Although the playing of this ensemble, headed by Walter Willson Cobbett, a leading member of the National Gramophonic Society committee, at times falls below the standards of other releases here, it actually comes up remarkably well after restoration. Because of the difficulty in finding references for these recordings - I can find no other instance of the Rubinstein side of this disc having been recorded - the XR aspect of the restoration is slightly "looser" than in some cases. Nevertheless, the end results are very pleasing indeed for acoustic horn chamber recordings.

Unprocessed section of transfer of first side of disc G, from one minute in

National Gramophonic Society recordings - a technical perspective

As a collection of recordings, the National Gramophonic Society discs contain some of the toughest challenges possible for the restoration and remastering engineer. There are no master discs to work from, and those regular pressed shellac discs which do exist are extremely rare. A daunting proportion of these are very poorly pressed, and many have particularly noisy, hissy or crackly surfaces.

The vast majority of the original discs came from Gramophone magazine's own near-mint collection, carefully preserved in the EMI vaults at Hayes and largely unplayed for many decades. Where a choice of discs was present, naturally the very best sides were chosen for transfer, which took place at Pristine Audio over the spring, summer and autumn of 2006. Discs were carefully cleaned and a choice of custom-made stylii were available to achieve the optimum replay possible. Transfers were made at 24-bit resolution and then archived in 32-bit sound. Some initial restorations were carried out at the time of transfer, but all of the recordings presented here have been newly XR-remastered, starting in February 2008, directly from those high-quality transfers.

Without the benefits of modern audio restoration technologies, it is safe to say that a good number of the Society's output would be beyond the listening tolerance of all but the most devoted and dedicated music-lover. Of the 165 numbered discs it is not until we reach discs 103-4 (the Malipiero String Quartet No. 2) that something truly remarkable happens sonically, a result of switching allegiances to the Columbia Record Company for recording and pressing duties.

Prior to this the results are variable in the extreme - and the problems don't really stop after disc 104 either - we are still talking about the early days of electrical recording, and it seems clear from this history of the Society that money was tight. But for the 1920's listener, these matters would surely have been secondary to being able to hear any of these works at all, as the National Gramophonic Society's remit was to record music that had been ignored by the other record companies.

The challenge for the 21st Century therefore is to render these recordings in such a way as to be faithful to the musicians as well as sparing the listener too much pain. I've tried to strike a careful balance between noise reduction and the dangers of over-processing and deadening the sound which, in some cases, may leave some of the blemishes more obvious than you might be used to hearing - if this is the case in any particular recording, I can only respond with "well you should have heard it before I started work on it!"

There are many fine recording here, and I hope you will enjoy them as much as I have.

Andrew Rose, March 2008

The National Gramophonic Society

The National Gramophonic Society (NGS) was founded in 1923 by the novelist Compton Mackenzie to promote music which was ignored by major music companies.

The Society was established for the recording and publication by subscription of classical music, principally chamber music, which was of limited circulation. Prominent on the committee for the selection of material was Walter Willson Cobbett, who was joined by Spencer Dyke (leader of a string quartet), W. R. Anderson, Alec Robinson, Peter Latham and Compton MacKenzie.

Cobbett (b 1847), a chamber-music specialist, had founded the Cobbett Competition in 1905 for a short form of String Quartet composition or 'Phantasy', and for other short chamber works, prizes won variously by William Yeates Hurlestone (1876-1906, pianist) (1905), Frank Bridge (1908), John Ireland (1909), J. Cliffe Forrester (1916), H. Waldo Warner (viola of the London Quartet) (1916), York Bowen (1918) and Cecil Armstrong Gibbs (1919). In 1921 he was offering further awards to Royal Academy and Royal College of Music graduates, and commissioned many new chamber works from English composers.

The National Gramophonic Society was therefore an expression of this impetus to the development of the taste for modern chamber music. The records, issued on 12-inch 78rpm (or in some cases 80rpm) discs with distinctive yellow labels, included the first-ever recordings of familiar works such as the C major quintet of Schubert and Brahms's clarinet quintet, along with pieces (then relatively little known) by Henry Purcell, Vivaldi and Mozart.

The organization also helped several living composers such as Ralph Vaughan Williams, Arnold Bax, Peter Warlock (first recording of The Curlew), Eugene Goossens, Arnold Schönberg (original chamber version of Verklärte Nacht) and Sir Edward Elgar to gain greater recognition for their works. The repertoire consisted largely of chamber music, featuring the Spencer Dyke Quartet and the International String Quartet, but included some works for small orchestra and a few vocal items. Musicians who took part included John Barbirolli (as both cellist and conductor), the clarinettists Charles Draper and Frederick Thurston, the oboeist Leon Goossens, the violinist Adila Fachiri, and the pianists Donald Francis Tovey, Harold Craxton, Kathleen Long and Ethel Bartlett.

The NGS ceased operations in 1931.

Notes from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gramophonic_Society

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