by Peter Cates

Laura Nyro

Laura Nyro

Smile, Columbia AL 33912 LP ,1975.

The late Laura Nyro was one very gifted singer, songwriter and pianist. A number of songs, Stoney End, Stoned Soul Picnic, Wedding Bell Blues, etc. have been covered by such artists as Barbra Streisand and the Fifth Dimension.

The 1975 Smile is a sterling example of the searing beauty and power of her on-going themes – life in the Bronx. Sexy Mama, Children of the Junks, Money, I am the Blues, Stormy Love, The Cat-song, Midnite Blues, and the title song mirror the drug addictions, needs to survive, and the moments of joy and love that preoccupy and sustain us. An album highly recommended.

Yannick Nezet-Seguin

Yannick Nezet-Seguin

The Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra Collection
Deutsche Grammophon 4835345, 6 CDs, live concerts 2008-2018.

Presently the music director of the Metropolitan Opera and other orchestras, Yannick Nezet-Seguin conducts the Rotterdam Philhar­monic in works by Beethoven, Shosta­kovich, Mahler, Tchaikov­sky, Bruckner etc. The performances are good, especially the Bruckner 8th Symphony, and would fit the needs of anyone wanting a set of choice basic repertoire.

A couple of Remington Records colorful album jackets

by Peter Cates

Georges Bizet

Bizet

Carmen excerpts
Remington RLP-199-15, mono LP, recorded in 1950.

Remington records was started in 1950 and stayed in business until 1957. The records themselves often had noisy surfaces; they also had very beautiful and colorful album covers, which makes them often collectible and also very expensive on different Internet sites. Finally, they had a catalog featuring both standard and unusual repertoire, artists familiar to classical record connoisseurs, and its share of pseudonyms or phony names.

The opera excerpts are beautifully sung, so many of the melodies – examples such as the Toreador Song, Habanera, etc. – appearing in everything from TV shows to ads. The names of the singers and conductor are unfortunately nowhere to be found, even on the Sound Fountain website, which otherwise contains so much fascinating info on the label and lots of photos of its album covers, including this release. Just type in the following on Google: Remington records, Jean Allain – Bizet Carmen and/or soundfountain.com, which is listed under Remington records on the Google site!

Musically, every Remington record on my shelves has something interesting, despite its faults otherwise.

by Peter Cates

Sarah Vaughan

Sings the Mancini Songbook
Mercury, 61009, stereo LP, recorded 1965.

Sarah Vaughan

Billy Eckstine

This very fine album, a bringing together of one of the finest singers and composers in American music history, was a collaboration that never got the attention it truly deserved. Singer Sarah Vaughan (1924-1990) brought thorough professionalism, exquisite taste, and vibrant heart and soul to her vocal art; if she made a bad record, I don’t know of it. Her early jazz sides during the mid-forties, some Columbia singles with arranger Percy Faith released after 1950, the mid-’50s Roulette LPs and ten years of Mercury vinyl beginning in 1957 that had duets with Billy Eckstine, and other entries too numerous to mention add up to a priceless legacy. After 1980, two personal favorites were the South Pacific CBS CD with Kiri Te Kanawa and Mandy Patinkin and the extraordinary Mystery of Man, a song cycle recorded in Germany and based on the poetry of a young man who later became Pope John Paul II.

Percy Faith

Henry Mancini

Henry Mancini produced a large, largely superb body of work noted for its own special beauties – soundtracks for Peter Gunn, Mr. Lucky, the Pink Panther, Romeo and Juliet, Charades, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, etc. forever; jazz and mood music arrangements; and the songs – Moon River, Dear Heart, Days of Wine and Roses, just three of the dozen songs on this week’s album, one most highly recommended.

Several selections can be heard on YouTube!

by Peter Cates

Felix Mendelssohn

This week I am focusing on the recordings of the Violin Concerto of Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847), conceived in 1838 and completed and first performed by the composer’s concertmaster, Ferdinand David, of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, where Mendelssohn was music director from 1835 to 1847. David also proved invaluable with his advice on many as­pects of scoring.

The Concerto has been performed and recorded innumerable times. This week, I would like to briefly comment on recordings that have given much pleasure over the decades and particularly emphasize the work’s rich catalog of different individual violinists who have their own styles, yet have conveyed the beauties of the Concerto itself.

Ferdinand David

Several historic recordings are worth searching out. Fritz Kreisler recorded a Victor 78 set back in the ‘30s, with the very competent Sir Landon Ronald, that was warmly expressive in its aristocratic framework. During the same decade, Joseph Szigeti gave a reading with the most exquisite bowing and phrasing, with Sir Thomas Beecham’s elegant, vibrant conducting of his own carefully formed and meticulously rehearsed London Philharmonic, then at its peak as possibly the finest recording orchestra in the world and creating a catalog of pristine Columbia

Fritz Kreisler

Mischa Elman did an RCA Victor album in the mid-’40s with the Chicago Symphony, under the Belgian conductor, Desire Defauw, in a style best described as that of tasteful reserve and nicely matching Defauw’s own interpretive worldview . Within a couple of years, Beecham’s elegant, vibrant conducting, provided for Szigeti more than ten years earlier, would rev up his recording with the then newly-formed Royal Philharmonic into a riveting collaboration with the dashing Jascha Heifetz, also an RCA Victor release.

To be continued next week!

(Read part 2 here.)

by Peter Cates

Something a little different this week:

Beethoven’s 5 Piano Concertos were a very significant body of work because they both consolidated the best of what the composer learned from his predecessors — Haydn, Mozart etc. – and broke new ground on the expansion of the piano’s technical possibilities and musical depths. These two considerations, as edifying as they are, cannot be explored more, due to limited space. What will be done instead is to touch briefly on the merits of each Concerto and to offer one recording that is quite special in and of itself from the shelves of duplicates in my possession.

Ludwig von Beethoven

Concerto no. 1 has a jubilant yet graceful beauty in its assertive rhythms and rich melodic writing. A performance of exceptional quality is the mid-’50s, nicely transferred radio broadcast featuring Sviatoslav Richter, with the gifted but very unknown Bratislav Bakala on the podium, one not to be confused with later Richter releases conducted by Karel Ancerl and Charles Munch. The pianist’s often larger than life virtuosity found a captivating vehicle in this work while Bakala’s astute care for every note matched Richter’s own. A CD is available through Berkshire Record Outlet with the pair’s Beethoven 3rd.

Concerto no. 2, actually composed before the 1st but published after it, is very headstrong in its feisty exhuberance. Rudolf Serkin made three recordings; the first one, from the early ‘50s for Columbia and with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, is my favorite of them. Serkin gave a headstrong performance and a very exciting one, both rhythmically and musically. It is available on a Sony CD through Amazon.

Concerto no. 3 is on a grander scale and one beautiful, powerful creation. The 1949 recording with the relatively unknown Eduard Erdmann and conductor Helmut Muller-Kray shows an especially eloquent, deeply moving understanding of its content. It is part of an inexpensive two-CD set on the historical Tahra label, also containing one of the Schubert Sonatas, and can be found via the above-mentioned Berkshire.

Concerto no. 4 is a masterpiece of sublime introspection. The 1962 collaboration between Van Cliburn and Fritz Reiner leading the Chicago Symphony was the result of several months worth of the most detailed preparation between the pianist and conductor and shows in the gripping performance available on a nicely remastered BMG CD, again available through Amazon.

Concerto no. 5, better known as the “Emperor,” was conceived on a heroic scale never before experienced in the piano repertoire. In addition, it may be the most frequently played of the five works in concert hall and recording studio, due to its very appealing musical scoring. One highly recommendable live performance from 1995 showcases the then 17-year-old Mihaela Ursuleasa, winner of first prize at the Clara Haskil competition in Switzerland, whose much too early 2012 death remains one inexplicable tragedy. Her rendition, with the late conductor, Jesus Lopez-Cobos, has a quality of newly-minted freshness and is a formidably distinctive entry among a large number of distinctive entries. The Claves CD contains a very engaging Mozart 9th Piano Concerto as its discmate and can be bought through Amazon.

Pianist Wilhelm Kempff considered these five Concertos inexhaustibly rewarding for both performer and listener!