by Peter Cates

Victor Red Seal recordings

A few Victor Red Seal recordings from the years of easily breakable 78 shellac discs.
Bruckner Symphony No. 7; Eugene Ormandy conducting the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra; Victor, M-276, eight discs, recorded January 5th and 7th, 1935.

Before his 44 years as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy (1899-1985) served in Minneapolis from 1931-1936 and made a number of records for Victor between January 16, 1934 and January 16, 1935. The 7th Symphony of Anton Bruckner (1824-1896) is a magnificent one of almost 60 minutes and scored for large orchestra with some of the most heavenly beautiful moments from a composer who was also a superb organist. When the Symphony was premiered in Vienna in 1886, the Waltz King, Johann Strauss Jr. (1825-1899), sent the following reply in a telegram – “Am much moved. It was the greatest impression of my life.”

Ormandy’s recording was one of tremendous beauty and power and still holds up well.

Wagner Die Feen Overture

Albert Coates conducting the London Symphony Orchestra; Victrola 11455, one disc, recorded in 1932.

Wagner completed his first opera, the infrequently performed Die Feen, when he was 20 years old. The Overture is decently listenable but far from the depths of his later masterworks. However, conductor Albert Coates (1882-1953) made a convincing case for it and drew tremendous playing from the London Symphony.

Coates was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, to an English businessman and his Russian-born wife and established a reputation in both England and Russia before World War I, serving as music director of the Russian Imperial Opera for five years before the 1917 Revolution. The Bolshevik government did keep him working but, by 1919, starvation threatened living conditions there, Coates fell ill, so he and his family left Russia, just barely making it to Finland and back to the United Kingdom.

Wagner

Rienzi Overture and Gotterdammerung Closing Scene; Leopold Stokowski conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra; Victor 6624/6625; 2 discs, recorded 1927.

Leopold Stokowski (1882-1977) was one of only two conductors (the other being his successor in Philadelphia, Eugene Ormandy) who recorded from the pre-1924 acoustic era to the four-channel quadraphonic one of the 1970s. Also, like his younger colleague, he left hundreds of recordings of an encyclopedic range of composers and some of his best records were the ones of the music of Richard Wagner (1813-1883). I cherish his Victor 78s of excerpts from his operas Parsifal – the Prelude and Good Friday Spell – and his Synthesis of Tristan and Isolde moments.

The above 1927 ones of Wagner’s heart-warmingly vibrant Rienzi Overture and the conclusion of Gotterdammerung (itself being five hours long and the fourth and last opera in the 16-hour Ring cycle) have a surging intensity, beauty and savagery that is implicit in the music itself, through which Stokowski doesn’t try to impose his own individuality and mannerisms as he did often in other recordings.

On June 14, 1912, Stokowski conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in an all-Wagner concert featuring the soprano Lillian “Lady” Nordica (1857-1914), who was born in Farmington, Maine, and lived her first eight years there.

Ernestine Schumann-Heink

Stille Nacht (Silent Night); Victor 88138, one disc, recorded 1908.

Contralto Ernestine Schumann-Heink (1861-1936) recorded prolifically, beginning as early as 1900 and her rich warmth and disciplined technique enabled her to sing very nicely through her last years, when she appeared at the Metropolitan Opera in Wagner’s Lohengrin at the age of 71, and had her own weekly radio show. Since I enjoy Christmas music any time of the year, preferably in small doses, I find this acoustic record from 112 years ago a good example of her ability to breathe new life into old songs and opera arias. Starting in the mid-1920s, she sang Silent Night on the radio every year during the Yuletide season.

During World War I, she gave concerts for the U.S. war effort and had three sons serving in our navy; she also had one son from her first marriage in Germany who was still living there and who was drafted into the Kaiser’s own submarine service.

by Peter Cates

Twilight Zone

Episode 150, “Stopover in a Quiet Town,” first aired on CBS April 24, 1964.

I saw this episode when it first aired 56 years ago and again last night (Sunday, June 14) on Netflix. Before setting down any thoughts, I offer a plot summary.

A young urban couple, Bob and Millie Frazier, wake up in a strange bedroom after attending a countryside party and trying to take a shorter route back to the city. Things start getting weirder when everything in the house and outside village, including a tree, squirrel and patch of grass prove to be cardboard or paper and only a little girl’s voice can be heard. Any spoiler on the ending will not be provided.

I was alone at home during the first viewing and still remember being spooked out by its small town setting, so similar to my hometown of East Vassalboro, Maine, and to the other quiet, charming, boring villages of so many other childhoods; Twilight Zone’s creator and host Rod Serling (1924-1975) had an extraordinary gift for blending the terror and pity that was called for millenniums ago by the Greek philosopher, Aristotle, in his Poetics on Drama as essential to any narrative. Serling also used this episode and so many others as parables on the evil, injustice and bad behavior so consistently occurring in the world then and now .

Barry Nelson (1917-2007) and Nancy Malone (1934-2015) give A-plus performances as the couple in conveying the entire gamut of emotions, including bewilderment, hope, fright, frustration and endearing love and affection for each other. Nelson was eulogized by his agent as “a very believable, naturalistic actor;” Nancy Malone moved on to directing and producing and became the first female vice-president in charge of television at 20th Century-Fox.

 

 

 

 

 

by Peter Cates

Grenville Mellen

Biddeford poet Grenville Mellen (June 19, 1799- September 5, 1841) was the son of Prentiss Mellen (1764-1840), Maine’s first Chief Justice of its Supreme Court from 1820 to 1834. The son was admitted to the bar after reading law with his father, got married and settled in North Yarmouth, setting up his practice there in 1825. Within three years, his wife and only child died and his own health and will to live deteriorated during the remaining 13 years of his life, but he did eke out an already beginning literary career with poems, sketches and essays on a mostly free lance basis.

Finally, out of desperation, he traveled to Cuba for his last summer, hoping the change of scene would improve his health. The trip didn’t help and he returned to New York where he died that fall.

The poems contained in the 1854 anthology, Native Poets of Maine, are somewhat overblown but they do contain lines that resonate. I quote the last of four stanzas in his Mount Washington:

Mount of the clouds! When winter round thee throws
The hoary mantle of the dying year,
Sublime amid thy canopy of snows,
Thy towers in bright magnificence appear!
‘Tis then we view thee with a chilling fear,
Till summer robes thee in her tints of blue;
When, lo! In soften’d grandeur, far, yet clear,
Thy battlements stand clothed in harmonious hue,
To swell as Freedom’s home on man’s unclouded view.

Being over 6,000 feet in the air and with its wondrous vistas, ferocious winds and bestial wintry weather, Mount Washington remains “sublime amid thy canopy of snows” and, during warmer months,”clothed in harmonious hue.”

Connie Francis

Among My Souvenirs;
God Bless America
MGM, K 12481, seven-inch 45 record, 1959 hit.

Now 82, singer Connie Francis wrote her autobiography in 2017, titled Among My Souvenirs, a song originally written in 1927, and a number one hit then for Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra, for Connie in 1959 and the last one for Marty Robbins in 1976. At her peak from 1958 to the late ‘60s, Connie Francis sang with such unique heart and soul; I still remember watching her sing Who’s Sorry Now in 1958 on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand and exuding charisma.

The flip side, God Bless America, was sung, for once, with beauty, nice sentiment and savvy intelligence in Ray Ellis’s very good arrangement (he worked a similar miracle for Johnny Mathis’s A Certain Smile the same 1959 year.). All in all, a very good 45 record.

by Peter Cates

Soprano: Licia Albanese

Parnassus recordings, PAR 1001, lp reissue of 78s and live arias recorded from 1936-46.

Licia Albanese (1909-2014) had one of the most magnificently beautiful soprano voices ever to be heard on record and I say this as a big fan of Maria Callas, Angela Gheorghiu, Mirella Freni, Victoria de los Angeles yada yada. This LP gathered a number of 78s she recorded for the Italian label, La Voce Del Padrone, between 1936 and 1940, the latter year being when she made her debut at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera and became a regular for 26 years; the program of 13 selections also contained three live radio appearances during World War II and encompassed Neapolitan songs and operatic arias from Bizet’s Carmen, Donizetti’s Don Pasquale and Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, Madama Butterfly and Turandot. And every selection is a gem.

But instead of trying to use my own words in describing these gems, I will provide what the annotator for this album wrote:

“Magic is a mysterious thing, and there was no mystery about Licia Albanese’s greatness. She was perpetually engaged in a quest for beauty in opera, and she sang with beautiful tone and beautiful art. To Albanese, every movement and every sound was meant to express the character she was portraying-but never at the expense of beauty. She was a beautiful woman and opera at the Metropolitan during the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s was more beautiful because of her.”

Her most famous role was Cio Cio San in Madame Butterfly, which she sang more than 300 times. A lot of her singing, along with interviews, can be accessed on YouTube.

Poet: Alice Christiana Meynell

Victorian poet Alice Christiana Meynell (1847-1922) was a devout Catholic and feminist and actively campaigned for women’s rights and against poverty and cruelty to animals. She is little read today, which is an unfortunate omission. I offer her very eloquent, powerful poem, The Lady Poverty, published in 1895:

The Lady Poverty was fair;
But she has lost her looks of late,
With change of times and change of air.
Ah, slattern! she neglects her hair,
Her gown, her shoes; she keeps no state
As once when her pure feet were bare.

Or — almost worse, if worse can be —
She scolds in parlors, dusts and trims,
Watches and counts. Oh, is this she
Whom Francis met, whose step was free,
Who with Obedience caroled hymns,
In Umbria walked with Chastity?

Where is her ladyhood? Not here,
Not among modern kinds of men;
But in the stony fields, where clear
Through the thin trees the skies appear,
In delicate spare soil and fen,
And slender landscape and austere.

What resonates so much is this poet’s sense of anger and heartbreak and how beauty, truth, honor and justice are so elusive in this world. Things do not seem to have changed much in the 125 years since this poem was published.

by Peter Cates

Beethoven

Symphony # 7
Eugene Ormandy conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra; Columbia, M-557, five 12- inch 78s, Recorded 1944.

Back during the 78 rpm days, lasting the first half of the 20th century, the record sides were three to five minutes in duration; when longer classical works were recorded, the scores were marked at certain notes to indicate when a red light in the studio would go off overhead, signalling everybody to stop. These limitations created a hectic rushed tension in trying to meet the deadline.

Thus, when the long playing records were released to the public in 1948 with 20 to 30 minutes of playing time, conductors and players could relax more. And performance practices were influenced by recording technology as much as musical considerations.

Eugene Ormandy commented on these pressures during an interview in the late ‘60s. He often felt inhibited by the limited time of conducting for the shorter 78 record sides and welcomed the LP days because he said he and the players could really let themselves go as musicians with longer takes.

Interestingly, after listening for decades to Ormandy’s recordings, I have found that a number of earlier 78 sets of certain works he re-recorded later had more of an uninhibited excitement than the later stereo ones. A case in point is the Beethoven Seventh Symphony from 1944 and his 1966 one from 18 years after the LP era began.

The Symphony itself is a masterpiece in its dance rhythms and wonderful beauty in each of the four movements. The opening movement has two distinct sections – the beginning Poco Sostenuto with its grand procession of leisurely pacing and the sprightly intense Vivace building to one of the greatest musical crescendos in all of Beethoven’s writing.

The second movement Allegretto is akin to a sweet embracing waltz of elegance in the writing for strings.

The third movement Presto has rambunctious, slam bang high spirits while the final fourth movement Allegro con brio is fast moving, headstrong jubilation at a genius level.

Ormandy gave a performance on these old 78s that might be seen as driven and hectic in places but he conveyed joy and conviction in every note and bar.

This performance can also be heard on YouTube and is an enriching listening experience, highly recommended.

Footnote: the individual who wrote program notes for this Symphony’s first performance in December 1813, commented that Beethoven was depicting a social revolution in the music itself and was verbally murdered by the composer for misreading its meaning.