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First in a series in participation with The Antal Doráti Centenary Society
Notes on the recording: Mercury's Living Presence recordings, which began in the early 1950's, were and remain legendary. The story of Mercury Records can be found at Wikipedia, from which the following excerpt is taken:
The recording presented here, made in April 1952, is an excellent example of the process. It was transcribed from test pressings in the collection of Bill Newman - an honourary member of the Antal Doráti Centenary Society, Bill worked for EMI and with Doráti personally at recording sessions with the LSO in London; he was also responsible for choosing and re-issuing all the Mercury classical recordings for the British market from approx.1959 - and was both suggested and supplied for Pristine Audio remastering by the Society. Unsurprisingly the original was in excellent condition, and the re-equalisation carried out for XR remastering was relatively minimal - a slight edginess in the upper treble centred around 5kHz was tamed, whilst we were able to bring a little 'air' back into the frequencies above 10kHz. The disc surfaces were almost immaculate and required little restoration processing, and the finished master responded excellently to the application of Ambient Stereo processing. This is the first of what we expect to be a series of releases of rare or previously un-reissued recordings by Doráti, working in collaboration with the Antal Doráti Centenary Society - in terms both of musical and recording quality it sets the standard bar exceptionally high!
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.
Antal Doráti biographical notes from Wikipedia
Antal Doráti KBE (April 9, 1906 – November 13, 1988) was a Hungarian-born conductor and composer. Doráti was born in Budapest, where his father was a violinist with the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra. He studied at the Franz Liszt Academy with Zoltán Kodály and Leo Weiner for composition and Béla Bartók for piano. He made his conducting debut in 1924 with the Budapest Royal Opera. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1947. He conducted the world premiere of Bartók's Viola Concerto (as completed by Tibor Serly) with the Minneapolis Symphony in 1949. As well as composing original works, he compiled and arranged pieces by Johann Strauss II for the ballet Graduation Ball, as well as Jacques Offenbach's La Belle Hélène and Bluebeard, and Modest Mussorgsky's Fair at Sorotchinsk. His autobiography, Notes of Seven Decades, was published in 1979. In 1983, Queen Elizabeth II made Doráti an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE). This entitled him to use the post-nominal letters KBE, but not to style himself “Sir Antal Dorati”. Dorati died at 82 years old in Gerzensee, Switzerland. He made his first recording with the London Philharmonic Orchestra for the recording label His Master's Voice. Over the course of his career Doráti made over 600 recordings. He was the first conductor to record the complete symphonies of Joseph Haydn in other than a very limited-release edition, with the Philharmonia Hungarica: an orchestra comprised of Hungarian musicians who fled the Soviet invasion of Hungary. He also recorded an unprecedented cycle of Haydn's operas. Doráti became especially well-known for his recordings of Tchaikovsky's music. He was the first conductor to record all three of Tchaikovsky's ballets - Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker - complete. The albums were recorded in mono in 1954, for Mercury Records, with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra (later renamed the Minnesota Orchestra), as part of their famous "Living Presence" series. All three ballets were at first issued separately, but were later re-issued in a 6-LP set. Dorati never re-recorded Swan Lake, but he did make a stereo recording of The Sleeping Beauty (again complete) with the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam for Philips Classics Records, and two complete recordings in stereo of The Nutcracker, one with the London Symphony Orchestra (again for Mercury), and the other with the Concertgebouw Orchestra for Philips - all this within a span of about twenty-seven years. He also recorded all four of Tchaikovsky's orchestral suites with the New Philharmonia Orchestra, and he was the first conductor to make a recording of Tchaikovsky's "1812" Overture (featuring the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra) with real cannons, brass band, and church bells, first in mono in 1954 and then in stereo in 1958. He also recorded all six of Tchaikovsky's symphonies with the London Symphony Orchestra. Other prominent composers in Doráti's recording career are Béla Bartók and Igor Stravinsky. His comprehensive series of Bartók's orchestral works for Mercury have been brought together on a 6-CD set. He also made the first stereo recording of Léo Delibes' Coppelia, with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra. An album set of Richard Wagner's opera The Flying Dutchman is also among Doráti's more popular recordings. He lived to make digital recordings, for English Decca Records (released in the U.S. on the London label), with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. One of these, the recording of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps, received the coveted French award Grand Prix du Disque.
Notes from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antal_Dorati
Mendelssohn - Symphony No. 4 musical notes from Wikipedia
The Symphony No. 4 in A major, Op. 90, commonly known as the Italian, is an orchestral symphony written by German composer Felix Mendelssohn. The work has its origins, like the composer's Scottish Symphony and the orchestral overture The Hebrides (Fingal's Cave), in the tour of Europe which occupied Mendelssohn from 1829 to 1831. Its inspiration is the colour and atmosphere of Italy, where Mendelssohn made sketches but left the work incomplete:
In February he wrote from Rome to his sister Fanny
The Italian Symphony was finished in Berlin, 13 March, 1833, in response to an invitation for a symphony from the London (now Royal) Philharmonic Society; he conducted the first performance himself in London on 13 May 1833, at a London Philharmonic Society concert. The symphony's success, and Mendelssohn's popularity, influenced the course of British music for the rest of the century. However, Mendelssohn remained unsatisfied with the composition, which cost him, he said, some of the bitterest moments of his career; he revised it in 1837 and even planned to write alternate versions of the second, third, and fourth movements. He never published the symphony, which only appeared in print in 1851, after his death. The piece is scored for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani and strings. It is in four movements:
The joyful first movement, in sonata form, is followed by an impression in D minor of a religious procession the composer witnessed in Naples. The third movement is a minuet in which trumpets are introduced in the trio, while the final movement (which is in the minor key throughout) incorporates dance figurations from the Roman saltarello and the Neapolitan tarantella. A typical performance lasts about half an hour.
Notes from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._4_(Mendelssohn)
Mozart - Symphony No. 40 musical notes from Wikipedia
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote his Symphony No. 40 in G minor, KV. 550, in 1788. The 40th Symphony is sometimes referred to as the “Great” G minor symphony, to distinguish it from the “Little” G minor symphony, No. 25. The two are the only minor-key symphonies Mozart wrote, with the possible exception of an early and recently rediscovered A minor symphony known nowadays as the Odense Symphony.
Composition The work was completed on 25 July 1788. The composition occupied an exceptionally productive period of just a few weeks in 1788, during which time he also completed the 39th and 41st symphonies (26 June and 10 August, respectively).
The question of the Symphony's premiere There is no completely solid documentary evidence that the premiere of the 40th Symphony took place in Mozart's lifetime. However, as Zaslaw (1983) points out, the circumstantial evidence that it was performed is very strong. On several occasions between the composition of the symphony and the composer's death, symphony concerts were given featuring Mozart's music, including concerts in which the program has survived, including a symphony, unidentified by date or key. These include:
Most important is the fact that Mozart revised his symphony (the manuscript of both versions still exists). As Zaslaw says, this "demonstrates that [the symphony] was performed, for Mozart would hardly have gone to the trouble of adding the clarinets and rewriting the flutes and oboes to accommodate them, had he not had a specific performance in view." The orchestra for the 1791 Vienna concert included the clarinetist brothers Anton and Johann Stadler; which, as Zaslaw points out, limits the possibilities to just the 39th and 41st symphonies. Zaslaw adds: "The version without clarinets must also have been performed, for the reorchestrated version of two passages in the slow movement, which exists in Mozart's hand, must have resulted from his having heard the work and discovered an aspect needing improvement." Concerning the concerts for which the Symphony was originally (1788) intended, Otto Erich Deutsch suggests that Mozart was preparing to hold a series of three "Concerts in the Casino", in a new casino in the Spiegelgasse owned by Philipp Otto. Mozart even sent a pair of tickets for this series to his friend Michael Puchberg. But it seems impossible to determine whether the concert series was held, or was cancelled for lack of interest. Zaslaw suggests that only the first of the three concerts was actually held.
The music The symphony is scored (in its revised version) for flute, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, and strings. Notably missing are trumpets and timpani. The work is in four movements, in the usual arrangement (fast movement, slow movement, minuet, fast movement) for a classical-style symphony:
Every movement but the third is in sonata form; the minuet and trio are in the usual ternary form. The first movement begins darkly, not with its first theme but with accompaniment, played by the lower strings with divided violas. The technique of beginning a work with an accompaniment figure was later used by Mozart in his final piano concerto (KV. 595) and later became a favorite of the Romantics (examples include the openings of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto and Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto). The second movement is a lyrical work in 6/8 time, in E flat major, the submediant (relative) major of the overall G minor key of the symphony. The minuet begins with an angry, cross-accented hemiola rhythm; various commentators have asserted that while the music is labeled "minuet," it would hardly be suitable for dancing. The contrasting gentle trio section, in G major, alternates the playing of the string section with that of the winds. The fourth movement is written largely in eight-bar phrases, following the general tendency toward rhythmic squareness in the finales of classical-era symphonies. A remarkable modulating passage, which strongly destabilizes the key, occurs at the beginning of the development section, in which every tone but one in the chromatic scale is played. The single note left out is in fact a g-natural (the tonic).
Reception This work has elicited varying interpretations from critics. Robert Schumann regarded it as possessing “Grecian lightness and grace”. Donald Francis Tovey saw in it the character of opera buffa. Almost certainly, however, the most common perception today is that the symphony is tragic in tone and intensely emotional; for example, Charles Rosen (in The Classical Style) has called the symphony "a work of passion, violence, and grief." Although interpretations differ, the symphony is unquestionably one of Mozart's most greatly admired works, and it is frequently performed and recorded.
Influence Ludwig van Beethoven knew the symphony well, copying out 29 measures from the score in one of his sketchbooks. It is thought that the opening theme of the last movement may have inspired Beethoven in composing the third movement of his Fifth Symphony. In addition, the opening movement of Beethoven's Piano Sonata Op. 2, No.1 in F minor seems to echo some of the rhythmic motives found in the final movement of the symphony (see Piano Sonata No. 1). Several works by Schubert, including one of his string quartets and, especially, the minuet of his Fifth Symphony, show some influence from this work, though Schubert's minuet lacks some of the rhythmic and contrapuntal complexities of Mozart's.
Notes from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._40_(Mozart)
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