FREDERICK STOCK and The Chicago Symphony, Volume 3 (1929-1930) - PASC699

This release is the third in a series devoted to longtime Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director Frederick Stock, inaugurated to celebrate the 150th anniversary of his birth in 1872. All of Stock’s symphonic recordings will be featured in upcoming volumes (his four concerto recordings have already been well-covered on CD reissues), presented for the most part in the order in which they were recorded. Several items here have not been available since the 78-rpm era (the “Ballabile” from Glazunov’s Les ruses d’amour, the Strauss Emperor Waltz and the Wagner Lohengrin Prelude).

Stock was born in Jülich, Germany, on 11 November 1872. His father, an army bandmaster, provided his early musical training. He entered Cologne Conservatory at the age of fourteen studying violin and composition; among his teachers was Humperdinck, and Willem Mengelberg was a classmate. Upon his graduation in 1890, he joined the Municipal Orchestra of Cologne as a violinist. Five years later, he auditioned for the visiting Theodore Thomas, who was recruiting players for his four-year-old Chicago Orchestra. Thomas hired him initially as a violist, but within four years he recognized Stock’s conducting talent and made him his assistant.

When Thomas died suddenly in January, 1905, Stock served as interim music director while the orchestra board attempted to secure the services of such well-known European conductors as Weingartner, Richter and Mottl. When the board’s efforts failed, Stock was appointed for a trial year. He was to remain music director until his death thirty-seven years later (20 October 1942), a record surpassed among major American orchestras only by Ormandy’s tenure with the Philadelphia, and by few other conductor/orchestra combinations throughout the world (Mengelberg/Concertgebouw, Mravinsky/Leningrad).

Stock’s recording career divides neatly into three periods. His Columbia acoustics of 1916-17 were succeeded, after an eight-year hiatus, by a series of electrical recordings for Victor (1925-30) which included Bach’s B Minor Suite, a Mozart 40th, Schumann’s “Spring” Symphony and Tchaikovsky’s Fifth. After another nine-year absence from the microphone, Stock and the Chicago Symphony rejoined Columbia for two seasons (1939-40 and 1940-41) for an extensive string of recordings including a Mozart “Prague”, the Schubert 9th, the Schumann Fourth, Brahms’ Third and Tragic Overture, Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite, Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra and numerous short “popular” works, as well as concerto recordings with Milstein and Piatigorsky. Returning to Victor for what turned out to be his final full season with the orchestra (1941-42), he made two much-admired Beethoven concerto recordings with Schnabel, as well as Dvořák’s In Nature’s Realm and the Chausson Symphony.

In the works presented in this volume, Stock returned to some composers who featured again and again in his recordings – Glazunov, Goldmark, Johann Strauss II and Wagner – while adding two who were new to his discography, Mozart and the conductor himself. Stock only recorded two Mozart works, the G minor Symphony heard here and the “Prague” Symphony, which he recorded for Columbia in 1939. His approach here is relatively straightforward, in the tradition of the large modern orchestra performances of the time, with just a few touches of string portamento to betray his Romantic-era roots.

Like many conductors of his generation, Stock also kept up an active composing life, producing symphonies, concertos and other types of orchestral works, many of which he premièred with the Chicago Symphony. Only one of these was recorded under his baton, his Symphonic Waltz of 1907, which looks back at the waltzes of Johann Strauss (whose Wine, Women and Song is quoted in the work) even as it seems to look forward to the dense orchestration and harmonies of Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier and the dreamlike diversions of Ravel’s La valse.

The economic depression which hit the United States in October, 1929 led the Victor label to severely curtail their program of Classical recording. The works heard here were the last that Stock and the Chicago Symphony would set down on disc for nine years. When they appeared once more before the microphone, they were back with their original label, Columbia. But that is a story for another volume . . .