ORMANDY and The Philadelphia Orchestra - The Early Years ∙ Volume 4 (1936-45) - PASC693

The present release is the fourth in a series devoted to Eugene Ormandy’s early recordings with the Philadelphia Orchestra for the Victor and World’s Greatest Music labels from 1936 through 1942, with one additional Victor recording (the Nutcracker Suite presented here) from 1945. While the recordings he made during this period with such legendary soloists as Rachmaninov, Kreisler, Heifetz, Feuermann, Rubinstein, Flagstad, Melchior and others have deservedly remained in the catalog for decades, this series focuses on his purely orchestral recordings, which have been rather overlooked in reissues. Among the items included in the present program, only the Tchaikovsky “Pathétique” has seen previous reissue on both LP and CD. The Nutcracker Suite was last offered on a 10-inch LP in the early 1950s; the Tchaikovsky Fifth has been unavailable since the 78-rpm era; and the two Rimsky-Korsakov items are seeing their first release here.

The Nutcracker Suite might rightly be called the Philadelphia Orchestra’s “contractual obligation album.” Ormandy had first recorded the work with them in December, 1941; but like many Victors of that period (including the Philadelphia sides conducted by Toscanini), the matrices suffered from processing problems that rendered them too noisy to release. By the end of the first Petrillo recording ban (1942-44), the orchestra had switched to Columbia, making their first records for that label in November, 1944. However, under their contract, they were allowed to re-make existing Victor sides that were awaiting release. And so, in January of 1945, this single album was made for RCA. The Overture is taken at a notably broader tempo than Ormandy would use in his 1952/3 Columbia LP remake, although for that later recording, he would still have the violins play an octave higher in repeated phrases in the “Waltz of the Flowers.”

Although he inherited Stokowski’s orchestra, Ormandy’s conducting idol was Toscanini, whose influence can be heard in the two Tchaikovsky symphony recordings. While the Fifth Symphony was not in the Italian Maestro’s repertoire, Ormandy’s 1941 recording reflects a Toscanini-like approach, with swift tempi and ever-forward movement (e.g., the end of the first movement). Ormandy restores the big cut in the fourth movement taken by Mengelberg (Pristine PASC 511) and Stock (PASC 684), as well as smaller ones imposed by Stokowski, like the lead-in to the final peroration in the fourth movement. A similar aesthetic is evident in the “Pathétique”, which dates from Ormandy’s first recording session with the Philadelphians in December, 1936 (with the first and last sides remade a month later). Ormandy would go on to re-record these two symphonies four more times over his long career, in increasingly more expansive readings.

The arrangement Ormandy made of a short, atmospheric scene from Rimsky-Korskakov’s opera, Christmas Eve, begins with music reminiscent of the Eastern Orthodox hymn Tchaikovsky used to open his 1812 Overture. No coupling for this side was recorded at the time, so it has remained unissued until now.

Ormandy’s Philadelphia recordings of Russian repertoire during this period are sparse; the only other work taken down in the studio was Lucien Cailliet’s transcription of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (already reissued on PASC 444). To conclude our program, we turn to a previously unpublished live performance. On the same Easter Sunday that Marian Anderson’s historic recital on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial captured the attention of American radio listeners, Ormandy and his Philadelphians offered a broadcast concert on NBC’s “Magic Key of RCA” program, concluding with a blazing performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian Easter Overture , which had to be abridged to fit the one-hour time constraint of the program.

Mark Obert-Thorn