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Superb sound quality and fabulous playing - with Stokowski at his best
This remastering was drawn from two excellent transfers of early 1950s RCA Victor LPs. Of the two, the Wagner shows its age slightly more than the Tchaikovsky, though both have come up remarkably well. In order to construct an accurate tonal reference for Aurora's Wedding it was necessary to attempt to 'do a Diaghilev' on a complete recording of Sleeping Beauty, and in doing so it became clear how little he actually changed the music. Aurora's Wedding is almost entirely a cut-and-paste collection of highlights from the full ballet, engineered by Diaghilev into something he could stage with his existing resources and sets - the degree to which it has been 'arranged' in the traditional musical sense is perhaps debatable: the music and scoring appears to be 99.9% Tchaikovsky, with the intervention being almost entirely confined to cutting and re-ordering. This is not in any way to denigrate Aurora's Wedding - it is delightful and at a very digestible 40 minutes a great listen - and this XR remastering has brought out an amazing palette of orchestral colour and depth, something barely hinted at in the original LP incarnation, but always waiting to be released from the confines of those early fifties grooves. Put together this is something like an orchestral highlights release of both of these otherwise very lengthy works. Stokowski draws on the finest musicians in New York at the time, with excellent results - the LP covers note the following:
The Music based on notes by Edward Johnson Aurora's Wedding was devised by Diaghilev when a lavish 1921 London production of Tchaikovsky's complete Sleeping Beauty was a costly failure. He salvaged what he could from the production by putting together a single one-act sequence of dances taken from the ballet and called it Aurora's Wedding. It has often been performed that way in the theatre, and Stokowski first recorded it in 1953. Stokowski was the first conductor in the USA to record a substantial selection of music from The Sleeping Beauty (over 50 minutes of music taken from all the acts) as opposed to the usual Suite, and he did that on RCA 78s in 1947. These were later issued on an early RCA LP and also an HMV LP in the UK.
Stokowski made three recordings of what is known as the "long version" of his Symphonic Synthesis of Tristan and Isolde - two Philadelphia sets in the 1930s and this 1950 LP. The sequence starts with the complete Act 1 Prelude of about 10 minutes. String temolos herald more music from Act 1 and then it moves to Acts 2 and 3 for the so-called Liebesnacht and, for the last 5 minutes or so, the Leibestod. (Stokowski also made what he called "Love Music from Acts 2 and 3" which is a sequence of about 25 minutes that omits the Act 1 Prelude entirely.) Stokowski never recorded the complete "long version" in stereo but his two assistant conductors did: Matthias Bamert and Jose Serebrier have both recorded it.
(Additional notes compiled by Andrew Rose)
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