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Captured and remastered in excellent sound quality
Notes on the recording: Our transcription of this recording, which was re-broadcast by BBC Radio some years after it took place from good-quality transcription discs, was taken from a reel-to-reel tape recording made of that later broadcast. For the first half of the concert this was perfect - the audio was clear and the tape clean. Two problems manifested themselves during the Tchaikovsky, however. The first, three short sound dropouts, were almost certainly a fault on our tape. The first of these dropouts was easily repaired - a single note sounds several times, and thus the very short missing section of one note could be reconstructed from another. The second two dropouts required more drastic measures - a different recording of the same piece, in a similar acoustic, was found. The pitches were matched, then the timing squashed to match Koussevitzky's pace precisely. The the alternative recording was converted to mono and equalised to match precisely that of the older recording, then crossfaded seamlessly into the Koussevitzky, with background hiss from the original recording added over the later one to complete the patch. The result is just about indetectable when you know where it comes, and lasts for two sections of perhaps a second's duration or so. The second major issue can probably be traced back to the original transcription discs - a persistent whine, varying continuously in frequency between 4kHz and 6.5kHz, and probably a disc cutter head fault, could clearly be heard once the recording had been re-equalised in the XR remastering process, and had to be laboriously filtered out without damaging any of the surrounding areas. This is the kind of restoration work that has only very recently become possible, and it allows this fabulous recording to finally be issued in such splendid sound quality.
Notes on the 24-bit download: Please see this page for test files and further information regarding this format. Although restoration work is done at a sample rate of 44.1kHz, we have upsampled the final 24-bit master to 48kHz for additional replay compatibility of our FLAC download. Our twenty-four bit FLAC downloads can be replayed in full quality using a standard DVD video player, a DVD writer and an inexpensive piece of PC software - see here for more information about replay from Video DVD discs.
Sergei Koussevitzky biographical notes from Wikipedia
Dr. Sergei Aleksandrovich Koussevitzky (Russian: Сергей Александрович Кусевицкий) (July 26, 1874 – June 4, 1951), was a Russian-born conductor, composer, and double-bassist known for his long tenure as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1924 to 1949. (His forename is transliterated into English as either Sergei or Serge and his surname is transliterated as variously Koussevitzky, Koussevitsky, Kussevitzky or, into Polish as Kusewicki.) Biography
Early career Koussevitzky was born into a poor Jewish family, growing up in Vyshny Volochyok, Tver Oblast, about 250 km northwest of Moscow. His parents were professional musicians who taught him violin, cello, and piano. At the age of fourteen he received a scholarship to the Musico-Dramatic Institute in Moscow for the study of double bass and music theory. He excelled at the bass, joining the Bolshoi Theatre orchestra at the age of twenty and succeeding his teacher as the principal bassist at twenty-seven. In 1901, he made his début as a soloist in Moscow, and won critical acclaim for his first Berlin recital in 1903. In 1902 he married his first wife, the dancer Nadezhda Galat. The same year he wrote a popular concerto for the double bass. Koussevitzky divorced his first wife and married Natalie Ushkov, the daughter of an extremely wealthy tea merchant, in 1905. At some time before this he had converted from Judaism to Christianity.[1] The couple moved to Germany. In Berlin Sergei studied conducting under Arthur Nikisch, using his new-found wealth to pay off his teacher's gambling debts.[2]
Conductor and publisher In 1908 Koussevitzky made his professional début as a conductor, hiring and leading a concert with the Berlin Philharmonic. The next year he founded his own orchestra in Moscow and branched out into the publishing business, forming his own firm and buying the catalogues of many of the greatest composers of the age. Among the composers published by Koussevitzky were Alexander Scriabin, Sergei Prokofiev, Igor Stravinsky and Nikolai Medtner. During the period 1909 to 1920 he established himself as a brilliant conductor in Europe. After the Russian Revolution, he returned to his homeland for a brief time to conduct the State Symphony Orchestra of Petrograd; in 1920, he made his way to Paris, where he organized the Concerts Koussevitzky, presenting new works by Prokofiev, Stravinsky, and Maurice Ravel. In 1924 he moved to the United States, and would become a citizen in 1941.
In America Koussevitzky was appointed conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1924, beginning a golden era for the ensemble that would continue until 1949. Over the next twenty-five years, he continued building the ensemble's reputation as a leading American orchestra, and developing its summer concert and educational programs at Tanglewood. In the early 1940s, he discovered a young tenor named Alfredo Cocozza, who would later be known as Mario Lanza, and provided him with a scholarship to attend Tanglewood. With the Boston Symphony he made numerous recordings, most of which well-regarded by critics. His students and protégés included Leonard Bernstein, Samuel Adler, and Sarah Caldwell. Bernstein guest conducted the Boston Symphony, including the 1951 world premiere of Charles Ives' Symphony No. 2. Bernstein's very last concert, in August 1990, was with the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood.
Champion of contemporary music In 1922, Koussevitzky commissioned what has come to be known as one of the greatest and most popular examples of orchestration in the repertoire, Maurice Ravel's arrangement of Modest Mussorgsky's 1874 suite for piano, Pictures at an Exhibition. It was premiered in Paris in 1923, and quickly became the most famous and celebrated orchestration of the work that had ever been made. Conductor Arturo Toscanini, who apparently had no great fondness for 19th century Russian music, considered the Mussorgsky-Ravel version of Pictures the greatest example of orchestration that had yet been produced, and performed and recorded the work for RCA Victor in 1953. Koussevitzky held the rights to this version for many years, and after his death, practically every celebrated conductor in existence recorded it. Koussevitzky was a great champion of modern music, commissioning a number of works from prominent composers. For the Boston Symphony Orchestra's 50th anniversary he commissioned Ravel's piano concerto, George Gershwin's Second Rhapsody, Prokofiev's Symphony No. 4, which Prokofiev later revised, Paul Hindemith's Concert Music for Strings and Brass, and Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, as well as works by Albert Roussel and Howard Hanson.[3]
Legacy In 1942 he founded the Koussevitzky Music Foundations whose charge is to foster and commission the performance of new work. Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes, Douglas Moore's opera The Ballad of Baby Doe, Béla Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra, Aaron Copland's Symphony No. 3, and Olivier Messiaen's Turangalîla-Symphonie are all direct results of the foundations. Following Koussevitzky's 1951 death, his widow, Olga Koussevitzky, presented double-bassist Gary Karr with his double bass, previously believed to be fabricated in 1611 by brothers Antonio and Girolamo Amati. The instrument now bears the names of both Karr and Koussevitzky.
Recordings Sergei Koussevitzky recorded with the Boston Symphony exclusively for RCA Victor, excepting a live recording made with Columbia (Roy Harris, "Symphony 1933") in Carnegie Hall, New York, during a concert on portable equipment. One quite notable early RCA session in Boston's Symphony Hall in 1930 was devoted to an early recording of Ravel's Boléro, and his very first sessions with the Boston orchestra of Beethoven's "Pastorale" Symphony and a suite from Stravinsky's "Petrouchka" were recorded in Symphony Hall in 1928. His nephew Fabian "Sevitzky" conducted the Indianapolis Symphony during this same period, making several recordings of his own for RCA Victor. Some of Koussevitzky's later recordings, including performances of the second suite from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet (1945, Symphony Hall, Boston) and first (1947, Carnegie Hall, New York, a session that included Mendelssohn's "Italian" Symphony) and fifth symphonies (1945, Symphony Hall, Boston), were reportedly mastered on Victor's revolutionary sound film optical recording process, first employed in this way with the San Francisco Symphony in March, 1942. [No, they weren't; they were simultaneously recorded on lacquer masters and 78 rpm waxes. The optical film process used for the Monteux/SFSO yielded awful-sounding results, viz. the Gruenberg VC with Heifetz] His very last recordings, made in November 1950, on magnetic tape using RCA's proprietary RT-2 1/4-inch machines at 30 inches per second, were acclaimed performances of Sibelius' Second Symphony and Grieg's "The Last Spring". Both have been rereleased by RCA/BMG on CD in Japan. Some of Koussevitzky's performances at Tanglewood, including a very spirited Beethoven "Egmont" Overture, were also filmed during the 1940s. According to Music & Arts Programs of America, a number of the Boston Symphony's 78 rpm recordings with Koussevitzky were issued on the bargain RCA Camden label, originally released at US$1.98 for a 12-inch LP album when similar top-of-the-line Red Seals were selling for US$5.98, in the early 1950s as the "Centennial Symphony Orchestra". One of the later albums featured Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf and Richard Srauss' "Til Eulenspiegel"; while the orchestra was again listed as the Centennial Symphony -- and the conductor not identified, the narrator, actor Richard Hale, inexplicably, was. Koussevitzky ultimately rerecorded the piece in Tanglewood with Eleanor Roosevelt during the summer of 1950 on magnetic tape; issued on three 45's, a 10-inch LP and three 78s, it has never been rereleased [correction: now available on a Naxos transfer by Mark Obert-Thorn] in spite of the popularity of the Camden disc with Hale. Hale was also the narrator for Arthur Fiedler's 1953 RCA recording of the same music with the Boston Pops. RCA often reissued historic recordings from the RCA Victor catalog on its Camden label with fictitious orchestral names to avoid having them in direct competition with newer recordings by the same artists on RCA Victor's upscale Red Seal label.
Notable premieres
In concert
On record
Notes from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serge_Koussevitsky
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