Pristine Classical Recorded Music

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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. [Richard Chlupaty of The Antal Doráti Centenary Society notes: "According to our tally of AD’s recordings, we’ve clocked up well over 700 works recorded in the studio; additionally, there are now a large number of live recordings –including unpublished items - which will bring the total to around 1000."]

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. 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

 

 

Kodály - Háry János Suite

musical notes from Wikipedia

 

Háry János is a "Hungarian folk opera" (that is, a spoken play with songs, in the manner of a Singspiel) in four acts by Zoltán Kodály to a Hungarian libretto by Béla Paulini and Zsolt Harsányi, based on the comic epic The Veteran (Az obsitos) by János Garay. First performance: Royal Hungarian Opera House, Budapest, 1926.

The story is of a veteran hussar in the Austrian army in the first half of the 19th century who sits in the village inn regaling his listeners with fantastic tales of heroism: his supposed exploits include winning the heart of the Empress Marie Louise, the wife of Napoleon, and then single-handedly defeating Napoleon and his armies. Nevertheless, he finally renounces all riches in order to go back to his village with his sweetheart.

From the music of the opera, Kodály extracted the orchestral Háry János Suite, one of the most popular pieces in the classical repertoire. This notably includes the cimbalom, a traditional Hungarian variant of the hammer dulcimer.

Both the suite and the opera begin with a 'musical sneeze', best explained in Kodály's own words: "According to Hungarian superstition, if a statement is followed by a sneeze of one of the hearers, it is regarded as confirmation of its truth. The Suite begins with a sneeze of this kind! One of Háry's group of faithful listeners … sneezes at the wildest assertions of the old tale-spinner."

According to Kodály, Háry János is "the personification of the Hungarian story-telling imagination. He does not tell lies; he imagines stories; he is a poet. What he tells us may never have happened, but he has experienced it in spirit, so it is more real than reality."

 

 

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

 

 

 

Béla Bartók - Middle years and career (1909–1939)

notes from Wikipedia

 

In 1909, Bartók married Márta Ziegler. Their son, Béla II, was born in 1910. In 1911, Bartók wrote what was to be his only opera, Bluebeard's Castle, dedicated to Márta. He entered it for a prize awarded by the Hungarian Fine Arts Commission, which rejected it out of hand as un-stageworthy (Leafstedt 1999). In 1917 Bartók revised the score in preparation for the 1918 première, for which he rewrote the ending. Following the 1919 revolution, he was pressured by the government to remove the name of the blacklisted librettist Béla Balázs (by then a refugee in Vienna) from the opera. Bluebeard's Castle received only one revival, in 1936, before Bartók emigrated. For the remainder of his life, although he was passionately devoted to Hungary, its people and its culture, he never felt much loyalty to its government or its official establishments.

After his disappointment over the Fine Arts Commission prize, Bartók wrote little for two or three years, preferring to concentrate on collecting and arranging folk music. He collected first in the Carpathian Basin (the then Kingdom of Hungary), where he notated Hungarian, Slovakian, Romanian and Bulgarian folk music. He also collected in Moldavia, Wallachia and in 1913 in Algeria. However, the outbreak of World War I forced him to stop these expeditions, and he returned to composing, writing the ballet The Wooden Prince in 1914–16 and the String Quartet No. 2 in 1915–17, both influenced by Debussy. It was The Wooden Prince which gave him some degree of international fame.

Raised as a Roman Catholic, Bartók had by his early adulthood become an atheist, and considered the existence of God as undecidable and unnecessary. He later became attracted to Unitarianism, and publicly converted to the Unitarian faith in 1916. His son later became president of the Hungarian Unitarian Church (Hughes 1999–2007).

He subsequently worked on another ballet, The Miraculous Mandarin influenced by Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, as well as Richard Strauss, following this up with his two violin sonatas (written in 1921 and 1922 respectively) which are harmonically and structurally some of the most complex pieces he wrote. The Miraculous Mandarin, a sordid modern story of prostitution, robbery, and murder, was started in 1918, but not performed until 1926 because of its sexual content. He wrote his third and fourth string quartets in 1927–28, after which his compositions demonstrate his mature style.

Notable examples of this period are Divertimento for strings (1939) and Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936). The String Quartet No. 5 (1934) is written in somewhat more traditional style. Bartók wrote his sixth and last string quartet in 1939, the sadness of which has been related to the death of Bartók’s mother and the looming war in Europe.

Bartók divorced Márta in 1923, and married a piano student, Ditta Pásztory. His second son, Péter, was born in 1924.

In 1936 he traveled to Turkey to collect and study folk music.

 

 

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