Germany’s oldest Mozart festival celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2021. The present jubilee boxed set presents previously unpublished treasures from the archive of the Bavarian Broadcasting. All live recordings from the Baroque Imperial Hall at Würzburg Residence are digital remasters.
Wagner: Tristan und Isolde / Vinay, Varnay, Malaniuk, Jochum
Andromeda
CD · 3 discs
$13.99Aug 14, 2015
Wagner's German opera: Tristan und Isolde. Performers include: Ramòn Vinay (Tristan), Astrid Varnay (Isolde), Ludwig Weber (König Marke), Ira Malaniuk (Brangäne), Gustav Neidlinger (Kurwenal), Hasso Eschert (Melot), Gerhard Stolze (Ein Hirt), Theo Adam (Ein Steuermann), Eugene Tobin (Ein Junger Seemann). Choir & Orchestra of the Bayreuth Festival, Eugen Jochum. Recorded live at Bayreuth in 1953.
One fact has been demonstrated to me as I did some research for this review: There is no logic whatsoever in pricing practices of the record industry. The major competition for this release is Daniel Barenboim’s Chicago Symphony Teldec recording (43495), which is also on two discs. Teldec U.S.A. priced it as two full discs—so on Amazon it sells for about $30, and on ArkivMusic for $34.99. However, on the British site MDT.uk.com its price for U.S. customers is listed as $18.50, because Teldec in Europe decided to price it as if it were one disc (which is rational, since it is just two minutes over the limit for one disc). On the other hand, this Bavarian Radio release seems to be treated in precisely the opposite manner: $26.77 is the U.S. price listed on MDT, but it is only $19.99 on ArkivMusic! You figure it out—I can’t!
Time for full disclosure: At the time of Barenboim’s recording (2001), I was managing the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and I played a role in persuading him to conduct the piece and him and Teldec to record it. Because of that I could not review it for Fanfare, but two reviewers did, in 26:2. Marc Mandel liked it very much but felt that Furtwängler’s own Vienna Philharmonic performance issued on Orfeo trumped Barenboim’s in the concluding section of the finale, where Mandel felt Barenboim let down just a bit. Martin Anderson expressed no reservations at all, in an unreservedly enthusiastic review.
Barenboim’s still remains the only readily available and enjoyable modern stereo recording. Alfred Walter’s Naxos effort is flabby beyond description, and one’s mind wanders halfway into the first movement, never to return. A performance by Georg Alexander Albrecht on Arte Nova is better, but not at the level of Barenboim or Furtwängler. Takashi Asahina’s fine Japanese recording from 1984 is just about impossible to obtain in the West (and may be so in Japan, too, for all I know). There are actually five (!) Furtwängler performances on disc, one a studio recording for DG, the other four all live readings. By far the best is the VPO on Orfeo (C365 941 B). It has good monaural 1950s broadcast sound, inspired playing, and of course the advocacy of the composer, who just happened to be one of the great conductors of the 20th century.
Both Barenboim and Furtwängler persuade one that this is an important, enjoyable score. As different writers have pointed out, there are elements of Bruckner, Strauss, Schmidt, Rachmaninoff, and probably others in its blood. It is old-fashioned for its time, to be sure, and it has its longeurs. But it is deeply moving, a work filled with some considerable anguish (much of it was written in Switzerland where Furtwängler had fled because he learned that he was on a Nazi assassination list, and where he was unable to conduct until he was cleared of Nazi affiliation charges by the Allies). It is also a work that doesn’t really sound like anyone else, despite having elements of many. In the end, one’s interest is maintained by the skillful orchestration and a strong element of melodic inspiration. For those interested in Furtwängler or in late-Romantic music, both Furtwängler’s and Barenboim’s recordings are valuable.
So where does this first-time issue of a 1954 broadcast fall? Right at the top level with those other two recordings. I reviewed the Furtwängler Orfeo release (a 1953 performance recorded in Vienna’s Musikvereinssaal) in the Classical Hall of Fame in Fanfare 18:5, and commented that it had some of the best recorded sound of any Furtwängler recording. That is true—but the Bavarian Radio folks were doing it even better in the middle 1950s, and what we have here is truly fine monaural recorded sound equal to many studio recordings being made at that time. It still of course cannot equal the sound quality of the Barenboim recording.
What distinguishes Jochum’s reading from the other two is his different approach to orchestral sonority and his tauter reading in general. Barenboim and Furtwängler both built their orchestral sound from the bottom up. Everything rested on a foundation of the basses and cellos, and, where appropriate, the lower brass. Jochum’s sound is brighter—it wouldn’t be fair to call it “top down,” but it is definitely a lighter sonority, with more emphasis on the upper strings and brass than is the case in the other two. What it lacks in lushness it compensates for with brighter colors. Add to that his extra dash of rhythmic snap, and you have a performance different enough to warrant exploration by anyone who loves this work. I would still not be without the composer’s own and the Barenboim, but I am very happy to have added this to my library. Renate Ulm’s very interesting and informative notes are an added plus.
Emil Gilels was born in Odessa on October 19, 1916. At five, he began to take lessons from Yakov Tkach. Gilels development was astonishingly rapid and by twelve, he had mastered Chopin's etudes. He gave his first public performance in 1929. The following year he was accepted to the Odessa Conservatory in the class of Berta Reingbald. Under her tutelage, Gilels blossomed. When Arthur Rubinstein came to Odessa in the early 1930s, he predicted that young Emil would one day eclipse them all. Gilels entered the first "All Union Competition" (1933), which he won unanimously. He then toured the Soviet Union and was acclaimed as the standard-bearer of a "new" Soviet pianism. In 1935 he moved to Moscow and entered the class of the legendary pianist and pedagogue Heinrich Neuhaus. At the start of 1936, Gilels performed Beethoven's third piano concerto with Otto Klemperer. Two years later, he took part in the "International Brussels Competition." The jury, numbering such luminaries as Leopold Stokowski, Otto Klemperer, Walter Gieseking, Emil von Sauer, Carlo Zecchi, Robert Casadesus and Samuil Feinberg, awarded him first prize. It was planned that he set forth on a long tour, including of the United States, but these were scotched by the Second World War. Throughout the war, Gilels performed all over the country. Rachmaninoff's 3rd Piano Concerto was a staple of his repertoire. When the war ended, he toured Europe and in 1955, became the first Soviet musician to tour the United States. Until his death in 1985, Emil Gilels continued to perform and record widely. He is universally acclaimed as one of the greatest pianists of all time. We are honored to present here live performances of two of his sterling concerto performances.
Among the many recordings of The Matthew Passion, two have always stood out for their historical importance and for their diffusion - one conducted by Otto Klemperer for EMI and the other one, conducted by Eugen Jochum for Phillips. Urania is now proposing that the second, recorded in Amsterdam in 1965 with an extraordinary voice cast. This release is complete in all parts and has a fabulous sound for all listeners. The Bach by Jochum is vast, but not romantic - on the contrary - he puts the Passion under a light of sweetness and sorrow, without the harshness and coldness, typical of the recent interpretations. Urania has also added Bruckner's Te Deum, recorded in Monaco of Bravaria in 1954 by the same Jochum.
Richard Strauss’ Metamorphoses for 23 solo strings, his last great orchestral work, was given its premiere on 25 January 1946 in Zürich, Switzerland under the direction of the work’s dedicatee, the eminent Swiss musician Paul Sacher (1906-99). + Here, the conductor Eugen Jochum (1902-87) conducts the dynamic Bavarian Radio Symphony, the orchestra he helped found. + The Concerto for Oboe in D, also one of the composer‘s late works, received its premiere a mere one month after Metamorphoses, also in Zürich. + The performers here are once again the BRSO and their solo oboist Stefan Schilli.
When Christian Ferras died at age 49. his friend and colleague Yehudi Menuhin wrote that Ferras was"possessed by music, immensely talented, and of both a generous and intense temperament."
Christian Ferras was one of the greatest violinists of the 20th century. Born in 1933, he was a guest soloist of the Nice Symphony orchestra in1942. In 1948 he won the First Prize at the International Scheveningen (Holland) Violin Competition and in 1949 won the top prize at the International Long-Thibaud Competition. Thereafter, he pursued a successful career as soloist with many of the world’s leading orchestras and in recitals with his long time accompanist, pianist Pierre Barbizet. He recorded for EMI and from 1964 for DG where he recorded the four main repertoire violin concertos, Brahms, Sibelius, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, with Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.
Fortunately, Christian Ferras left behind a rich recorded legacy, that enable us to continue to enjoy his great artistry.
Mozart, Sarasate, Sibelius, Wieniawski: Bronislaw Gimpel Live vol. 1 / Gimpel, Berlin Philharmonic et al.
Doremi
CD · 2 discs
$40.99May 06, 2022
A brilliant violinist with virtuoso flair, effortless technique and wonderful artistry. Bronislaw Gimpel has made many recordings and his legacy is also preserved on many radio broadcasts, such as those in this album. Born in Lvov, Poland, in 1911, Gimpel began the violin at 5. His first public appearance came in 1919, when he played the Mendelssohn Concerto. His international performances began at 14, when he performed the Goldmark Concerto with the Vienna Philharmonic. He immigrated to the United States in 1937 and Otto Klemperer invited him to be the concertmaster of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which he also occasionally conducted. He remained there until 1942. In the latter half of the 1940s he was a frequent soloist and conductor of the ABC Radio Orchestra in New York. In 1950 he formed the Mannes-Gimpel-Silva Piano Trio which had a great success. In 1956 he returned to Europe where he re-established a substantial concert career and his engagements included guest soloist with the Berlin Philharmonic. He returned to the United States in 1967 to take up a position on the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Connecticut and returned once again to Europe in 1973 to teach at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. Gimpel passed away in 1979, at the age of 68.
SOMM Recordings announces Bruckner from the Archives, a major new, six-double-CD-volume series celebrating the 200th anniversary of Anton Bruckner’s birth in 1824. Conceived and designed by SOMM Executive Producer and acclaimed Audio Restoration Engineer Lani Spahr with support from the Bruckner Society of America, the series features rare archival recordings of Bruckner’s 11 symphonies and selected other important works, many appearing for the first time in any form.
Recordings have been sourced from the more than 11,000 Bruckner performances in the Archive of John F. Berky, Executive Secretary of the Bruckner Society of America, who also acts as Consultant for this important series.
Across the series, authoritative notes by Professor Benjamin M. Korstvedt, Jeppson Professor of Music at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, President of the Bruckner Society of America and member of the Editorial Board of the New Anton Bruckner Complete Edition, trace Bruckner’s life and compositional development from the Symphony in F minor (1862) to the unfinished Ninth Symphony (1894).
Volume 1 (SOMM 5025) will be released on 15 March 2024 and includes two Symphonies: in F minor (Bruckner Orchestra, Linz conducted by Kurt Wöss) and No.1 in C minor, ‘Linz’ (Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Eugen Jochum); Bruckner’s only String Quartet (Koeckert Quartet); Psalm 112 (Vienna Akademie Kammerchor, Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Henry Swoboda); the Overture in G minor (WDR Symphony Orchestra, Cologne, Dean Dixon); the March in D minor, and Three Pieces for Orchestra (Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Hans Weisbach).
Future volumes include never-before released performances conducted by noted Brucknerians Eugen and Georg Ludwig Jochum, Eduard van Beinum, Volkmar Andreae, Christoph von Dohnányi, Herbert von Karajan, and Joseph Keilberth. Lani Spahr’s previous SOMM releases include the lauded four-volume sets Vaughan Williams Live (ARIADNE 5016, 5018-20) and Elgar Remastered (SOMMCD 261-4), and a Gramophone Editor’s Choice for “superb audio restorations [bringing] performances fully to life” for Elgar from America, Volume 3 (Ariadne 5015-2).
The Hungarian violinist Johanna Martzy was born in Temesvár, then in Hungary, today in Romania, on October 26, 1924, and was hailed as a wunderkind. At the age of seven, she became the last pupil to be taken under the wing of the great violin teacher Jenö Hubay, who had enabled artists like Joseph Szigeti and Sándor Végh to fly high. Ferenc Gabriel continued the girl's training after Hubay's death, helping her to win first prize at the Hubay Competition when she was seventeen. She took up studies at the Ferenc Liszt Music Academy in Budapest the following year and made her orchestral debut with the Tchaikovsky Concerto under the baton of Willem Mengelberg a year later. When Nazi Germany occupied Hungary in 1944, Johanna Martzy and her husband Béla Szillery fled via Austria and France to Switzerland. There she won the Concours International d'Exécution Musicale in Geneva in 1947, and her international career gradually gained momentum. She began making gramophone records in 1950; Ferenc Fricsay's recording of the Dvorák concerto for Deutsche Grammophon of 1953 is notable for its rousing intensity and still enjoys benchmark status. In 1954 and 1955 EMI's legendary record producer Walter Legge made the recording of Bach's Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin presented here.
In spite of a successful concert comeback in the 1960s, she was no longer in the top flight. It seems symbolical that it was in Budapest that she discovered she had hepatitis in 1969. Johanna Martzy steadily grew weaker and died in Switzerland on August 13, 1979, a year after the death of her husband. The present recordings remain a rare attestation of the brilliance of Johanna Martzy's playing, and it ensures her everlasting fame, at least among connoisseurs.
REVIEW:
The Hungarian violinist Johanna Martzy, who died in Zurich in 1979 at the age of only 54, experienced a short, steep international career at the beginning of the 1950s. She has remained an icon for insiders to this day and is considered the last great representative of the Hungarian violin school.
Profil has now refreshed the majority of their EMI recordings plus two Yellow Label concertos produced in 1952 and 1953 by Mozart (KV 218) under Jochum and the legendary Dvořák concerto under Fricsay and packed them into a 6-CD box set. The EMI bundle includes the two concertos by Brahms (1954) and Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1955) recorded with Paul Kletzki, which are still among the most expressive interpretations of the entire discography, as well as Schubert's (almost) complete works for violin and piano, and then also her legendary Abbey Road recordings of Bach's solo sonatas and partitas.
Martzy embodies the romantic Bach conception of the time, which aims for intensity, expressiveness, and flowing legato, and an aesthetic that wants to overwhelm the listener with beauty and dramatic stringency. At the same time, on her full-bodied, almost viola-like sonorous Bergonzi violin from 1733, she ignites such an inner fervor and draws such arcs of suspense that one cannot evade her infinitely spun, plastic lines. Every single tone is suggestively shaped and part of the flowing universe: drama and logic in one. And with the changing keys it also changes the respective basic color of its tone, i.e. from the darkened sonority of the D minor partita to the radiantly bright E major of the third partita. You can feel the objective and subjective power of this music at every moment: they are monologues of harrowing beauty.
Her interpretations of the concertos by Mozart, Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Brahms and Dvořák, glowing with intensity, shine as flawlessly clean, full-bodied and sonorous and at the same time as inwardly lively, as passionately urgent and lyrically shaped - she practices a kind of musical perfection that everyone Leaving virtuosity behind, proclaimed as a means to penetrate to the true inner, to the glowing human message, to enchant and shake us with pure, flowing heart energy. It's no wonder that Johanna Martzy enjoys iconic status in professional circles and that the few original LPs that have survived are sold at top prices.
Inspired by his impressive descriptions, ensemble feuervogel follows Coryat on his voyage of discovery through the alleyways, squares, and canals of the Serenissima: from the magnificent St Mark's Basilica to the noble palazzi of the Venetian aristocracy and the elegant courts where music, dance, and courtly art played a central role. The concert programme Observations of Venice brings ornate diminutions and madrigals into dialogue with dance music, ricercars, and canzonas. In this way, ensemble feuervogel receives the music of the Venetian cinquecento, which Coryat wrote was "so beautiful that I would willingly walk a hundred miles at any time to hear the like of it."
