Orchestra
dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia
Conductor: Vittorio de Sabata Recorded
in Rome on 7th February, 1947
Released as 2 HMV 78s: DB.6493-4
Matrix numbers: 2BA.6123-6
Takes: 3, 1, 2, 5
Download ID: 193675
(Duration 17'21")
Play
sample:
...it
seems to me that this is one of the most technically advanced 78rpm
recordings ever made...
Andrew Rose, restoration engineer
Debussy's
Jeux, written in 1912 as a short ballet for Diaghilev, suffered
the unfortunate fate of being first staged just two weeks prior to Stravinsky's
The Rite of Spring, one of the most notorious première 'event's
in the history of classical music. Given its dense structure, lack of
repetitions and forward-looking use of harmony, it is perhaps a piece
which rewards repeated listening, especially in an audience unused to
such music.
Alas,
Jeux quietly disappeared, and was not really given much attention
again until this recording, its premiere, was made in 1947, and received
the coveted double-stars of The Record Guide in 1952. Its conductor,
the brilliant de Sabata, regarded this as the favourite of his
relatively few recordings - he was far happier in the concert hall than
the studio.
Michael
Steinberg's excellent program notes on the genesis of Jeux for
the San Francisco Symphony website
are particularly illuminating, especially as they explain how the original
ideas sketched by Nijinsky at a lunch at the Savoy Hotel, London (including
the rejected ideas that the dancers would be three male lovers, and that
a plane would crash in the background), were developed into the synopsis
given to the audience on the opening night:
The
scene is a garden at dusk; a tennis ball has been lost; a boy
and two girls are searching for it. The artificial light of the
large electric lamps shedding fantastic rays about them suggests
the idea of childish games: they play hide and seek, they try
to catch one another, they quarrel, they sulk without cause. The
night is warm, the sky is bathed in pale light; they embrace.
But the spell is broken by another tennis ball thrown in mischievously
by an unknown hand. Surprised and alarmed, the boy and girls disappear
into the nocturnal depths of the garden.
Technical
notes
I
restored this music from a pair of near-mint shellac discs, and it seems
to me that this is one of the most technically advanced 78rpm recordings
ever made. It would be some 20 months after this recording was made that
HMV started to use tape technology, so here we have work from the very
final days of regular direct-to-disc recording at 78rpm.
Although
Decca were keen to trumpet their ffrr system in their advertising
and on labels, beginning about a year after they'd started using it in
1945, HMV stayed quiet about similar advances they'd made at about the
same time, presumeably so as not to harm sales of older recordings. (In
a similar, apparently backward-looking move, they came into the LP era
some two years after their main competitors, despite the obvious advantages
of the new medium.)
From
a technical perspective, there is no reason why a wide-grooved disc rotating
at a relatively high speed should not be able to deliver superior results
to that of a microgroove record turning far more slowly. It is mainly
the medium of shellac itself, and its high surface noise, which causes
the greatest problems with material such as this.
Coupled
with the short playing time of 78s and their demise became inevitable
in the face of tape and vinyl, but there's little doubt in my mind of
the technical superiority 0f many aspects of this recording over a good
deal of early vinyl material. Here we have a frequency range that stretches
right up to 20kHz, very little discernable wow and flutter, and after
noise reduction processing, an incredible signal to noise ratio of almost
60dB!
Ironically
much of this stems from a technique of cutting the master recording directly,
without the possibility of edits or the sonic degradation of analogue
dubs and copying, to which some record companies would return in the latter
days of the LP as part of a drive to improve sound quality on vinyl...
Because
of the exceptional quality of this recording we have chosen to encode
our MP3 files at the same ultra-high resolution used for our vinyl transfers
to ensure optimum reproduction.
REVIEW
OF: Claude Debussy: Jeux
(Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Vittorio
de Sabata)
Jeux
is Debussy's final and most neglected orchestral masterpiece.
One reason for the neglect is that this Mt. Everest of musical
abstraction was actually presented as a Diaghilev ballet (1913)
with a trivial wisp of a story involving two female tennis
players vying for the same male, where the fall of the tennis
balls signal the key points in the structure. The second reason
is that this music is profoundly new, a far advance beyond
La Mer and Images. It is a subtle, interconnected web of musical
tissue with motives appearing, developing and transforming
without borders or boundaries, always coruscatingly beautiful.
Very few performances have been able to maintain this constant
motion and slowly growing tension without premature anticlimax
or without getting beached in a tensionless sandbar.
In
my opinion, only three conductors have really gotten Jeux
right: Haitink (Philips), Boulez (DG) and now De Sabata (Pristine
Audio). If anything De Sabata brings an added passion to Jeux
that makes it so very much more sensual and less evanescent
without losing any of the clarity of Boulez or the poise of
Haitink. Never was I more aware of the human yearning below
the shifting textures of Jeux. The urgency of De Sabata's
last three minutes followed by the final evaporation cannot
be matched by the other two.
The
sonic work on the 1947 pressings of Jeux will surely rank
with Pristine Audio's finest work. The sweetness of the strings,
the clarity of the woodwinds, the fullness of the bass, and
the lack of a hint of harshness or glassiness banishes any
desire for stereo.
Download
our Full Discography Printable text listings of all Pristine Audio historic releases
Restoration
by Andrew Rose:
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...it
seems to me that this is one of the most technically advanced 78rpm
recordings ever made...
