FREDERICK STOCK and The Chicago Symphony, Volume 6 (1941) - PASC771

This final volume of our series devoted to Frederick Stock’s purely orchestral recordings with the Chicago Symphony features the remainder of the sides made during his December, 1941 Victor sessions other than Arthur Benjamin’s Overture to an Italian Comedy, which was placed at the end of the prior volume due to timing constraints.

Stock’s compositional efforts include several transcriptions, a few of which he recorded in Chicago going back to the acoustic era. The Bach “St. Anne” Prelude and Fugue is the most ambitious of the works that he orchestrated to see release on disc, and is more opulently scored than Arnold Schoenberg’s take on the same work (which that composer conducted with the CSO in 1934). One other Stock transcription from these sessions, an electric remake of his arrangement of “The Star-Spangled Banner”, has never been released and is believed to be lost.

Stock made few Wagner recordings, but what he did leave behind was memorable. The “Forest Murmurs” from Siegfried was meant to replace Mengelberg’s 1928 New York recording in the Victor catalog, yet for unknown reasons it was never issued on 78s. It has been transferred here from a vinyl test pressing.

Although Stock excelled in the rhythms and color of such middle European repertoire as that of Dvořák, Smetana and Suk, he recorded comparatively little of it. In these sessions, having already set down the middle part of Dvořák’s “Nature, Life and Love” triptych (the Carnival Overture, in Volume 1), he now assayed the first section, In Nature’s Realm. These, along with a single Slavonic Dance (in Volume 2) were his only Dvořák recordings. It was issued on three sides, and having no appropriate new filler, was released with a reissue of his 1926 recording of a movement from Suk’s Fairy Tale Suite.

The Chicago Symphony’s long association on disc with the music of Richard Strauss began during Stock’s tenure. Yet, despite strong performances of Also Sprach Zarathustra (on Volume 4) and a live broadcast of Till Eulenspiegel, the single movement from the composer’s early work Aus Italien is the total of Stock’s Strauss on disc. The conductor’s way with the graceful swooping of the birds over Sorrento makes one wish Victor had recorded the entire score.

Chausson’s only symphony has never achieved the popularity of that of his teacher and mentor César Franck, on which it is clearly modeled. Only three recordings of it were made during the entire 78 rpm era; but Stock’s is the best played, best recorded and arguably the most persuasively interpreted of the lot. His passionate reading makes a strong case for this underrated score, and also includes a surprise in the third movement: Stock rescores the solo trumpet-led chorale theme toward the end for the organ, in a nod to Saint-Saëns’ Third Symphony (or perhaps Tchaikovsky’s Manfred, where it appears in a similar place), a substitution not to be found in any other recording.

Stock returned for two more Victor sessions in July of 1942, recording the Beethoven Fourth and Fifth (“Emperor”) Concertos with Artur Schnabel, performances which have stayed in the catalog for much of the time since and are not included in this series. He died three months later, ending a 47-year association with the Chicago Symphony, 37 of it spent as its music director, one of the longest tenures of any conductor-orchestra association in history.

Mark Obert-Thorn