In this week's newsletter:

• Respighi - Roman Festivals, Church Music, Fountains of Rome - a triple spectacular
  
• Hertz - much-anticipated second volume of his complete San Francisco recordings
  
• PADA Exclusives - Serly conducts Bartók - a joint Duffy/Rose remastering production
  
• Gramophone Review:  Rob Cowan on Alfred Hertz Volume One
  

Editorial - An e-mail to savour

Just a short note this week from me, you may be relieved to see! When we released a collection of Felix Slatkin's recordings three weeks ago, we obtained a mailing address for his son Leonard Slatkin at the Detroit Symphony and sent him a copy of the CD. This was received a few days ago, and on Wednesday morning I awoke to find the following short message from Mr. Slatkin in my in-box - the kind of thing that makes this all worthwhile:

"It is a pleasure to hear my dad's musicianship brought up to new sonic heights. The results of this remastering are nothing short of amazing"

I'm pleased to have been able to respond to the great conductor with the news that another Felix Slatkin release will hopefully be available early in 2010.


Christmas 2009

It always seems so early to be thinking about this, but we do always get increasingly busy here between now and the start of December. If you're planning any Christmas purchases from Pristine I'd urge you to get in early before the rush - especially those in the UK with the threat of postal strikes hanging ominously in the air.

We'll be putting together some gift idea links on the website soon, but in the meantime you might wish to be reminded of last year's Christmas hit - A Very Pristine Christmas (PAMX005) - which features a collection of seasonal and related fare in transfers by myself, Dr. John Duffy, Peter Harrison, Ward Marston and Mark Obert-Thorn.

And if you're planning to treat yourself to something really special, we've held prices on our 1TB Digital Music Collection drive (€1190) and have been able to drop the price of the 2TB RAID drives by €160 to €1300 as hardware prices have fallen, though the difficulty in obtaining the smallest, 500GB model of drive has led us to withdraw this option. Do note that these drives are prepared to order and will always take a few days longer to reach you than our CDs. If you have specific drive requirements not represented by two options currently available, please get in touch for a quote.


E-mail problems here

We've suffered a variety of odd e-mail problems recently, leading to a number of communications going astray. If you've tried to contact me and received no reply, please resend your e-mail! Note that at present the e-mail address music@pristineclassical.com is having severe problems - andrew@pristineaudio.com seems to be more reliable.

Andrew Rose, Pristine Audio

Also of interest today:

• Archive Classics - excellent weekly online radio programme dedicated to historic recordings:
  
  Archive Classics tx 16/10/2009

  This week’s Featured Recording is a sublime performance of Schubert’s String Quintet in C major, recorded live in 1953 at the music festival which Pablo Casals established at Prades in Spain. The performers are Jacob Krachmalni (then concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra) and Orrea Pernel (violins), Karen Tuttle (viola), and Madeline Foley and Pablo Casals (cello). 
  
  Only a short extract is available on the free podcast: subscribers can access the complete work.
  
  This week’s podcast opens with the Egyptian March by the `Waltz King’, Johann Strauss II, recorded on 1 January 1952 at one of the Vienna Philharmonic’s famous New Year concerts. The conductor, Clemens Krauss, often directed the orchestra in the post-war years, and made a famous recording with them of Strauss’s `Die Fledermaus’.
  
  Stephen Johnson continues with another recording from the 1950s, this time of Chopin’s Piano Sonata No.2, played by the great Russian pianist Yakov Flier (1912 -77). Flier had a huge repertory, ranging from Bach to contemporary works, but was at his strongest in the romantic repertoire. This 1956 recording was made during a ten-year absence from the concert platform due to a hand injury. 
  
  Finally, the American violinist Oscar Shumsky (1917 – 2000), regarded by his fellow violinists as one of the greatest virtuosos of all time, plays the sparkling finale of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor. This recording, with the NBC Symphony under Wilfrid Pelletier, dates from the late 1940s, when Shumsky was beginning a stellar solo career.
  
  Bonus Track for subscribers only:
  
  The Dance Finale from Prokofiev’s ballet `Chout’, recorded in 1947 by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Serge Koussevitzsky.

Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra
conducted by Antal Doráti
The Philharmonia Orchestra
conducted by Alceo Galliera
Recorded 1954  and 1955

Transfers from the collection of Edward Johnson
XR remastering by Andrew Rose at Pristine Audio, October 2009
Cover artwork based on a photograph of Antal Doráti

Total duration: 65:26

For more download and CD options, see our website

The FLAC downloads:

Doráti and Galliera magnificent in Respighi

All the bombast and spectacular orchestration brilliantly conveyed

• RESPIGHI Feste romane (Roman Festivals)
• RESPIGHI Vetrate di chiesa (Church Windows)
  Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra
  conducted by Antal Doráti
  20 November, 1954, Northrop Auditorium, Minneapolis
  First issued as Mercury MG 50046
  
  
  
• RESPIGHI Fontane di Roma (Roman Fountains)
  The Philharmonia Orchestra
  conducted by Alceo Galliera
  18-21 March, 1955, Kingsway Hall, London
  First issued as UK Columbia 33 CX 1339
  
  

"...The subjects illustrated in Stained-glass windows, written in 1926, are The flight into Egypt, with the little caravan moving slowly through the desert ; The archangel Michael in his battle with the dragon—which ends with a colossal tam-tam stroke as the latter falls from Heaven ; The matins of St. Clara—probably the best musically, in a vein of quiet melancholy ; and a majestic St. Gregory the Great. The orchestra is already a large one, with triple woodwind, four trumpets, piano, organ and three tam-tams among much else, but it pales into insignificance beside Roman festivals, which is in the super-colossal class and adds three buccine or Roman bugles, mandoline, clarinet in D, a whole range of different sorts of bells, and pretty well everything in the kitchen but the sink (and I wouldn't swear that it too wasn't called on somewhere). The movements depict the martyrs, the lions and the mob of the Circenses ; the Jubilation of pilgrims reaching Rome ; the October festival of hunting and romance (Respighi at his best) ; and the riotous clamour of the Epiphany celebrations in the Piazza Navona—a frenzied movement which recalls, and attempts to outdo, the Fair scene in Petrouchka. Antal Dorati has a real outing with his orchestra, which plays with the utmost abandon..." - Gramophone, June 1956 - review of Doráti

"This music is dependent, more than most, on its recording and the Fountains of Rome has been lucky in all its issues, from the excellent Toscanini/H.M.V. to the present one. On sampling the older ones again I thought the Nixa less good than I remembered and the Mercury, though perhaps the most clearly vivid of all, does lack warmth. Warmth is a quality in which this new Columbia excels and the quiet movements are particularly good to hear, especially as they are also played so exquisitely. The whole of the last section (the Villa Medici at Evening) is as beautiful as I ever remember hearing it. The brilliant movements are well reproduced too and since the playing throughout is by the Philharmonia at their best, this is a record of the work not to be overlooked." - Gramophone, April 1956 - review of Galliera

Three Respighi pieces are brought together on this collection. From 1954 we Antal Doráti's superb Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra recordings of Roman Festivals and Church Windows - the latter featuring perhaps the longest and most reverberant gong you'll ever hear on a record.

Captured by Mercury for their legendary Living Presence mono LP series using a single Telefunken microphone, it's a classic of its era.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in London a few months later we find the Philharmonia Orchestra under the baton of Alceo Galleria, making a fine and well-received recording of Respighi's The Fountains of Rome for EMI's UK Columbia label.

It's another fine and dramatic performance, as usual requiring huge orchestral forces - together they make an excellent set.

Download listening sample: (Church Windows - 2. San Michele Arcangelo, 224kbps ambient stereo)

Notes on the recording:

ll three of these excellent recordings manages to capture the - at times over-the-top - exuberance of Respighi's orchestral writing well, and though the Doráti does appear to suffer a slight top end roll-off towards the end of each side this happens slowly enough and is mild enough that one is rarely aware of it when listening through.

What certainly cannot be missed here is perhaps the most dramatic hit on the tam-tam (or gong) I've ever heard on record. From the crash at the end of the second movement of Church Windows until the decay finally falls under the opening bars of the third movement there's an incredible 18 seconds of reverberant sound.

Robert Benson, writing in Classical CD Review in 2002, investigated this single note in Respighi's score. He found Ormandy's stereo Philadelphia to run to "a paltry 7 seconds" whilst on Chandos, Geoffrey Simon's 1984 recording manages a "far better recorded" 12 second. But ultimately, "no other recording approaches the Doráti spectacular."

You can hear for yourself this mighty crash in our sample here, though you'll have to listen to the full piece to get to grips with the deep 32 foot organ stops, and what Gramophone's reviewer somewhat sniffily refers to as "pretty well everything in the kitchen but the sink"!

 

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

New release today:

Alfred Hertz and the SFSO, Volume II
Pristine Audio PASC 195

San Francisco Symphony Orchestra
conducted by Alfred Hertz 
Recorded by Victor between 1925 and 1928

Producer and Audio Restoration Engineer: Mark Obert-Thorn
Cover artwork based on a photograph of Alfred Hertz

Total duration: 61:46

©2009 Pristine Audio.

For more download and CD options, see our website

The downloads:

One of the most important conductors of the early C20

Second of four volumes comprising the complete San Francisco recordings

 

"...The last pages confirm our impression of Alfred Hertz as a musician of exciting power and refinement, whose further work we await with no small anticipation." 
- Gary Lemco, Audiophile Audition, review of Hertz Volume 1

 

• LISZT Les Préludes, Symphonic Poem No. 3 (15:37)
  Recorded 27th February 1928 at the Scottish Rite Temple, Oakland
  Matrix nos: PCVE 42014-4R, 42029-1, 42031-3 and 42032-2
  First issued on Victor 6863 and 6864
  
  
• WAGNER Parsifal: Prelude to Act I (13:46)
  
• WAGNER Parsifal: Good Friday Spell (Act III) (11:10)
  Recorded 24th, 26th and 31st January, 1925 (Prelude) 
  and 31st January and 2nd February 1925 (Good Friday Spell) in Oakland
  Matrix nos: PC 61-2, 62-3, 63-2, 75-3, 76-3 and 78-2
  First issued on Victor 6489 through 6500
  
  
• WAGNER Tristan und Isolde: Prelude to Act I (9:06)
  
• WAGNER Tristan und Isolde: Liebestod (Act III) (6:09)
  Recorded 20th April 1926 (Prelude) and 22nd April 1926 (Liebestod) in Oakland
  Matrix nos: PCVE 169-3 and 170-3; PBVE 175-3 and 176-3
  First issued on Victor 6585 and 1169
  
  
• BRAHMS Hungarian Dance No. 5 in G minor (orch. Parlow) (2:38)
  
• BRAHMS Hungarian Dance No. 6 in D major (orch. Parlow) (3:20)
  
  Recorded 13th April 1927 in the Columbia Theatre, San Francisco
  
  Matrix nos: PBVE-248-2 and 249-1
  
  First issued on Victor 1296
  

The first release in Pristine's Alfred Hertz series has raised a lot of interest amongst collectors and music lovers - as well as with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra itself, which is shortly to celebrate its centenary.

These largely-forgotten recordings have surprised and delighted all who've heard them, and as a result we've persuaded transfer engineer Mark Obert-Thorn to bring forward the second volume well ahead of its planned release date.

This selection takes us from 1925 to 1928, offering some of the very last acoustic releases by Victor before moving into the electric age. As a result it's sonically quite eclectic - and musically it's just as good as the first volume promised, with fine interpretations of music by Liszt, Wagner and Brahms. If you've yet to hear Hertz, now's an excellent opportunity; if you bought the last volume I know you'll want this one!

Download listening sample:   (BRAHMS Hungarian Dance No. 6, 224kbps mono)

Notes on the recording:

The present collection offers a good example of the rapid development of recording technology during the 1920s, as well as Hertz’s misfortune to have been at the tail-end of obsolescent methods. When the Victor Talking Machine Company’s mobile recording unit arrived in San Francisco in January, 1925, acoustic recording was just on the verge of being replaced. By March, Victor would begin using the new electrical method for all its sessions. Indeed, their first electrically recorded Red Seal release (Cortot performing Schubert and Chopin) was Victor 6502, just two catalog numbers after the final disc of Hertz’s Parsifal excerpts.

For their next visit (April, 1926), the Victor engineers brought electrical equipment, but continued to use a small studio and what appears to be acoustic-style tuba reinforcement of the bass line for Hertz’s Tristan recordings. Coupled with the fuzzy sound of the loud passages, the overall result is more comparable to the 1925 electric orchestrals Victor had been producing than the more open, natural sound afforded Stokowski the Philadelphia Orchestra in a session held two months later in the Academy of Music (two Strauss waltzes on Victor 6584). The brief passage linking the end of the Prelude with the beginning of the Liebestod is omitted in this version, probably due to timing issues related to Victor’s decision to issue them separately on one 12-inch and one 10-inch disc.

By the time of the April, 1927 San Francisco sessions, the recordings had been moved to a larger hall, and a warm, full acoustic was provided for the Hungarian Dances, which Hertz dispatches with tremendous vitality and élan. The recording of Les Préludes from the following February, however, is hobbled by an acoustically-compromised dubbing on the first side, (which was, unfortunately, the only way it was released). The performance itself rivals Mengelberg’s more famous Concertgebouw version from the following year.

The sources for the present transfers were the original arch-label discs for the Parsifal sides (their only form of issue); pre-war “Gold” label pressings for the Tristan and Hungarian Dances; and scroll-label “Z” pressings for Les Préludes. The severe pitch fluctuations in the original Tristan sides have been corrected in this transfer.

Mark Obert-Thorn

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

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