In this week's newsletter:

• Stokowski - first volume of the Philadelphia acoustic recordings: one-off recordings and rarities
  
• PADA Exclusives - Leonard Pennario plays Liszt
  
• Audiophile Audition Review:  Stokowski's Tchaikovsky 5, reviewed by Gary Lemco
  

Editorial - Licensing and economics in the historic classical world...

It's now nearly four years since Naxos pulled their historic recordings from the shelves of record stores across the USA, forcing American music lovers to resort to importing older recordings issued on the label (which are in the public domain in other countries, most notably in Canada and within the European Union). The judgement (which actually only applied to New York State, but would be prohibitively expensive to contest elsewhere in the US) ruled that all recordings made prior to 1972 were held in copyright until 2067 under the state's common law.

The effect of this ruling has been, shall we say, a little unforunate for American music-lovers - and I would suggest furthermore that this single-state ruling has also reduced the availability of historic recordings for the rest of the world as well: the USA is most certainly Pristine's biggest market, despite operating from France, and without it we'd struggle to survive. For those reliant on shop-based CD sales this must be a much tougher problem to crack as the ruling must surely have reduced overall sales considerably, despite the large number of people importing by mail order from outside the US, and thus will have reduced some record companies historic businesses to the level of unsustainability. (One wonders how much this has, for example, inadvertently led to the point where Cala Records has now issued its final Stokowski CD?)

People have asked me before now why Pristine Audio operates purely within the realm of public domain recordings, and even then, why don't we licence them? The answer to this question is quite simple - money. The biggest collection of historic studio recordings in Europe almost certainly sits in the EMI vaults at Hayes, Middlesex. It's available to anyone who wishes to licence recordings, both in and out of copyright. EMI will happily send their masters to Abbey Road for transfer (naturally you can't get your own hands on them), and have a set rate of royalties dependent on the material which, on face value, appears reasonable.

The problem is the upfront fee. Major record companies operate in a different financial universe to the likes of Pristine. A quick check of our total sales so far (since launching in February 2005) indicates that only one of our recordings might have just broken even had it incurred the EMI licence fee - the irony here is that Toscanini's Bruckner 7cannot be licensed from anyone, and was supposedly under lock and key in a library in New York. (For the record, we do not know how it 'escaped' - but were grateful for an uncompressed transfer copy to work from for our release.)No other recording in our catalogue yet comes close to realising EMI's 'advance fee'.

A side-effect of all this is that you're unlikely to see our releases appearing at a certain prestigious classical awards ceremony anytime soon. It's hard to promote one's magazine alongside award winning CDs when they cannot be displayed on the same in-store rack in the biggest market in the world for classical music - and I strongly suspect there's a lot of hard publishing economics involved here when shortlisting takes place. And so, once again, the awards for historic releases will go to a record company with the money behind it to afford the licencing fees - or to the original record company itself (the three shortlisted finalists for one historic award this year are releases by EMI, EMI and, yes, EMI).

This isn't to say that the best recordings of the year won't win. But if some record companies are effectively black-listed, what is the point of these awards? If there's no place for the smaller company, operating entirely within the law in Europe and elsewhere, because they can't afford the entry fee to the US market - regardless of whether or not their product merits consideration - how is innovation, risk-taking, and the hours of dedicated hard work involved in restoring and remastering historic recordings to be properly judged? (Imagine an Oscars ceremony where the only films ever under consideration came from about half a dozen studios...)

The music awards in question have never asked us for submissions nor short-listed any of our recordings - the same goes for a good number of other record companies working in the same field who are also absent from those US record stores. I hope that when the man from EMI takes his inevitable award there may be some people who'll understand that the playing field was anything but level.

Andrew Rose, Pristine Audio

Also of interest today:

• Archive Classics - excellent weekly online radio programme dedicated to historic recordings:
  
  Archive Classics tx 02/10/2009

  This week Archive Classics’ focus on Schubert’s chamber music continues with his superb Piano Trio No.1 in B flat, D898 as the Featured Recording. Stephen Johnson has chosen a 1953 recording by Jean Fournier (violin), Antonio Janigro (cello) and Paul Badura-Skoda (piano), a famous piano trio combination of that era. Only a short extract is available on the free podcast: subscribers can access the complete work.
  
  Stephen Johnson begins this week with an all-time favourite, Mozart’s charming Serenade `Eine kleine Nachtmusik’, K525. He’s chosen a 1940 recording by the strings of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra under the great Willem Mengelberg, who directed the Dutch orchestra for 56 years from 1895 until his death in March 1951, just days before his 80th birthday.
  
  And staying in the Classical era, there’s Haydn’s delightful Symphony No.94 in G, known as the `Surprise’. Haydn was worried that his London audience might snooze through the slow movement, so he decided he’d wake them up with a bang! Stephen has chosen a 1956 recording by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under another famously long-lived and industrious conductor, Pierre Monteux.
  
  Bonus Track for subscribers only:
  
  Aaron Copland’s `Lincoln Portrait’, extracts from President Lincoln’s speeches with musical accompaniment, written in 1942 as part of a series of portraits of American heroes. This recording, with Melvyn Douglas (speaker) and the Boston Symphony under Serge Koussevitszky, dates from 1946.

The Philadelphia Orchestra
conducted by Leopold Stokowski 
Recorded 1917-1924

Transfers by Edward Johnson
Restoration and XR remastering by Andrew Rose, September 2009
Cover artwork based on a photograph of Leopold Stokowski

Total duration: 70:37 
©2009 Pristine Audio

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For more download and CD options, see our website

The FLAC downloads:

All the acoustic recordings Stokowski made only once

Plus his first Firebird Suite - in astonishing XR-remastered sound quality

• BRAHMS Hungarian Dance No. 5 in G minor (2:53)
  Recorded 24/10/1917, first issued as Victor 64752, Matrix B-20888-3
  
  
• BRAHMS Hungarian Dance No. 6 in D (3:05)
  Recorded 24/10/1917, first issued as Victor 64753, Matrix B-20889-2 
  
  
• GRIEG Anitra's Dance from 'Peer Gynt' Suite No. 1, Op.46 (3:11)
  Recorded 8/11/1917, first issued as Victor 64768, Matrix B-21067-2
  
  
• MOZART 3. Menuetto, Symphony No. 40 in G minor, K550 (4:00)
  Recorded 9/5/1919, first issued as Victor 74609, Matrix C-22813-6
  
  
• WEBER Invitation to the Dance, J260 (arr. Weingartner) (4:45)
  Recorded 9/5/1919, first issued as Victor 74598, Matrix C-22821-2
  
  
• BEETHOVEN 2. Allegretto Scherzando, Symphony No. 8 in F, Op. 93 (4:06)
  Recorded 20/5/1920, first issued as Victor 74661, Matrix C-24127-3
  
  
• WAGNER Overture to 'Tannhäuser' (Dresden version) (13:03)
  Recorded 7/11 & 5/12/1921, first issued as Victor 74758, 74759, 74768
  Matrices C-22808-10, 22814-7, 24999-2
  
  
• STRAVINSKY Fireworks, Op. 4 (3:35)
  Recorded 6/11/1922, first issued as Victor 1112, Matrix B-27064-2
  
  
• THOMAS Gavotte from 'Mignon' (1:54)
  Recorded 6/3/1923, first issued as Victor 66172, Matrix B-27982-1
  
  
• RIMSKY-KORSAKOV Dance of the Tumblers from 'Snow Maiden' (3:43)
  Recorded 19/3/1923, first issued as Victor 74849, Matrix C-27938-1
  
  
• GOUNOD Waltz from 'Faust' (3:07)
  Recorded 1/5/1923, first issued as Victor 66171, Matrix B-27099-8
  
  
• WAGNER Festive March from 'Tannhäuser' (4:18)
  Recorded 28/4/1924 first issued as Victor 6478, Matrix C-29051-6
  
  
• STRAVINSKY Firebird Suite (16:02)
  Recorded 13/10/1924, first issued as Victor 6492/3 
  Matrices C-30992-3, 30993-3, 30994-2, 30995-3
  
  
• LIADOV Dance of the Amazon, Op. 65 (2:37)
  Recorded 13/10/1924, first issued as Victor 1112, Matrix B-31263-2
  
  

Beginning in 1917, the recording career of Leopold Stokowski is surely one of the longest ever - he died in 1977, aged 95, on the day he had intended to record Rachmaninov's Second Symphony.

This new release charts the earliest days of this lengthy output, concentrating on those recordings unique to his acoustic output - including major symphonic music by Beethoven and Mozart, as well as important works by Brahms, Wagner, Stravinsky and others.

Also included here is Stokowski's very first recording of a piece he would return to more often than any other conductor - Stravinsky'sFirebird Suite in its US disc première - cut to wax in the dying days of the acoustic era in late 1924 and never reissued until now.

The whole collection is presented in a new XR remastering which achieves an incredible sound quality more akin to microphone recordings than those of the acoustic horn - an truly essential listen.

Download listening sample: (Brahms - Hungarian Dance No. 5, 224kbps ambient stereo)

Notes on the recordings:

Stokowski made his first recordings with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1917 though, as Edward Johnson has noted, "between 1917 and 1924, they made an estimated 450 acoustic recordings, but the old method of playing into a large horn gave a very poor representation of orchestral sound, and of all their acoustic discs, only 60 or so were actually issued..."

Indeed, Stokowski's very first acoustic recordings were never released - his first attempts at the two Brahms Hungarian Dances included here were recorded on 22nd October, 1917, together with two works by Tchaikovsky. All four recordings were remade - in the case of the Brahms, just two days later, to become the first released recordings conducted by Stokowski.

It is indeed true, as Edward Johnson states, that in their 'natural' state, acoustic recordings made a pretty poor job of capturing anything much - though HMV's legendary producer Fred Gaisberg always had an affectionate soft spot for the way they captured the human voice. It has become a generalisation to state that the recordings captured little below 200Hz, and perhaps little above 2500Hz, or perhaps 3000Hz at a push.

However, as these recordings demonstrate, this was not necessarily the case - though it often takes the kind of advanced restoration processing that Pristine's XR remastering brings to these recordings to uncover the real range and quality of acoustic recordings. In the case, for example, of the first recording on this collection, there's a full bass going down to (and possibly below) 70Hz - a frequency extension of almost two octaves over the accepted lower limits. Meanwhile, throughout the recording one can clearly hear string harmonics in the 3500-4000Hz range, and where the brass plays at full volume there's genuine audio content up at (and beyond) 5kHz, which is not far off the upper end of electrical recordings.

In order to hear these extremes it has been necessary first to dramatically re-equalise sound that has been highly coloured and harmonically distorted by the horn it was recorded through. This therefore comprises the first stage of the XR process in this context. Secondly we then have to apply highly selective, targeted noise reduction to those frequencies which have received what has often been a quite enormous level boost, rooting out the noise and leaving as much of the actual recorded audio intact.

The results of this are genuinely astonishing - even more so when the records were slowed down to concert pitch (apparently it was common for Victor to deliberately record at below 78rpm so that their records sounded brighter when played back at their stated speed). The majority were out by up to a full semitone (though some were considerably closer to true concert pitch), and the correction of this adds further depth and authenticity to the instrumental sound, as well as giving a much more sensible idea of Stokowski's tempi.

The recordings here, ordered by date of recording, include every piece (or version) that Stokowski only recorded once and in the acoustic era. It was astonishing to learn that his later studio recordings included neither Mozart's 40th Symphonynor Beethoven's Eighth, and that as a result the movements here represent his only studio-recorded comments on these major works. Meanwhile the Dresden version of Wagner's Tannhäuser Overture was replaced by the later Paris version in all his subsequent recordings.

Finally, I decided to add one work which Stokowski recorded more than any other conductor - Stravinsky's Firebird Suite, in a rare acoustic recording which was made right at the end of the acoustic era, and was swiftly remade in front of a microphone. Like many of the recordings in this collection, it has never been reissued on vinyl or CD.

These XR-remastered recordings probably serve to knock about ten years off the perceived age of many of these recordings (though they won't of course disguise the substitution of tubas for double basses) - and these remarkable recordings can be enjoyed as if they were recorded in the early days of electrical recordings, rather than the dying days of the acoustic horn - albeit with at times slightly higher surface noise.

 

Available as 320kbps MP3, 16-bit FLAC, 24-bit FLAC, Ambient Stereo FLAC, CD
or listen on demand with Pristine Audio Direct Access (PADA)