Festive Ormandy

Cover design by Alex Steinweiss

Of Ottorino Respighi's three orchestral suites celebrating his adopted home city of Rome (Fountains of Rome, Pines of Rome, and Roman Festivals), I confess my favorite has always been the last one, mainly because it is the most fun. Respighi, like Liszt, seems to be most authentically himself when he can cut loose and play, and nowhere did he do so more than in this piece (unless it was in the kid-in-a-candy-store orchestrations of Antiche Arie e Danze). This is its first American recording to be released (since Toscanini's, with the same orchestra, from five years earlier, did not see the light of day until 1976):

Respighi: Feste Romane (1928)
Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy
Recorded April 18, 1946
Columbia Masterworks set MM-707, three 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC file, 60.69 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 39.78 MB)

About five years ago, I uploaded Ormandy's first Philadelphia recording of Sibelius' First Symphony, along with his Minneapolis recording of Kodály's Háry János Suite. I noted the existence of an earlier recording of the same symphony from Minneapolis, and have now located a copy of that, and here it is:

Sibelius: Symphony No. 1 in E Minor, Op. 39
Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy
Recorded January 16, 1935
Victor Musical Masterpiece set DM-290, five 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 110.30 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 66.42 MB)

Originally issued with a generic cover, by the time of my pressing, c. 1940, the set was sporting this simple but evocative cover design:

Carpenter: Adventures in a Perambulator (Ormandy)

John Alden Carpenter

Barely remembered today, John Alden Carpenter (1876-1951), born 140 years ago next Sunday (Feb. 28) in the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge, Illinois, was among the most celebrated of living American composers in the period before such younger men as Aaron Copland and Samuel Barber became prominent. Like his almost exact contemporary, Charles Ives, he was a successful businessman who composed in his spare time, and also like Ives, his works are imbued with an American spirit; but while Ives' works are an evocation of 19th-century America through sometimes aggressively modern-sounding means, Carpenter's take the opposite route, often evoking the 20th century (e.g., his ballets Krazy Kat and Skyscrapers) in a more conservative style. One of his best-remembered works is this charming baby's-eye view of life on the streets one hundred years ago, written in 1914 for Frederick Stock and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra:

Carpenter: Adventures in a Perambulator, suite for orchestra
Recorded January 17, 22 and 23, 1934
and
Mozart: The Marriage of Figaro - Overture
Recorded January 23, 1934
Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy
Victor Musical Masterpiece set M-238, four 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 86.50 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 55.47 MB)

These were some of the fruits from Ormandy's first recording sessions as conductor of a major symphony orchestra. The series of sessions actually ran from Tuesday, January 16, through Wednesday the 24th - every day except Sunday. The session of the 17th which produced this Carpenter suite also produced the recording of Kodály's "Háry János" Suite that can be heard here.

UPDATE (June 16, 2016): The listings at USCB's online Discography of American Historical Recordings (formerly the Encyclopedic Discography of Victor Recordings) now include the 1934 Ormandy-Minneapolis sessions, and they indicate that retakes of the Carpenter suite from January 22 (sides 3 and 4) and January 23 (sides 6 and 7) were used for M-238.

Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 2 (Mitropoulos)

Cover design by Alex Steinweiss

This weekend - March 1 - marks the 119th birth anniversary of the great Greek maestro, Dimitri Mitropoulos (1896-1960), principal conductor of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra from 1937 to 1949. From 1939 to 1946 the orchestra and its conductor recorded exclusively for Columbia, afterwards signing on with RCA Victor. From their last series of Columbia sessions came this exciting version of Tchaikovsky's "Little Russian" Symphony:

Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 2 in C minor, Op. 17 ("Little Russian")
Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos
Recorded March 10 and 11, 1946
Columbia Masterworks set MM-673, five 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 85.70 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 58.08 MB)

Schumann: Second Symphony (Mitropoulos)

The Second Symphony of Robert Schumann has always been my favorite of his four, as it was, apparently, for Leonard Bernstein. Bernstein's "passionate identification" with the work (the quote is from Richard Burton's 1994 biography of Lenny) dated from the time he was an 18-year old student at Harvard, where, in January, 1937, he was part of a reception welcoming Dimitri Mitropoulos, who was in town to conduct two concerts with the Boston Symphony. Mitropoulos would became Bernstein's first mentor, in fact the first person to encourage him to become a conductor. The Greek maestro straightaway invited the young undergraduate to attend not only his concerts but all rehearsals as well, which Bernstein did, despite imminent mid-term exams. The second of these 1937 Boston programs featured a Mitropoulos specialty, Schumann's Second Symphony:

Schumann: Symphony No. 2 in C Major, Op. 61
Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos
Recorded December 3, 1940
Columbia Masterworks set M-503, five 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 90.88 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 64.19 MB)

Mitropoulos' recording of this symphony was only the second to be made in America, and only the fourth worldwide - after acoustic and electric versions by Hans Pfitzner (both for Polydor), and this 1936 version by Ormandy (for Victor) which was its chief competitor during the 1940s.

Mozart by Mitropoulos

The great Greek conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos (1896-1960) was renowned as an interpreter of 20th century music, but one hardly associates him at all with music before Beethoven (except for a few orchestral transcriptions of Bach organ works).  He made only one commercial recording of Mozart's music, other than a concerto accompaniment (for Vronsky and Babin in the concerto for two pianos), and that was of a piece so obscure that it represented a first on records at the time.  This was of two entr'actes from his incidental music for "Thamos, King of Egypt" - a play by Tobias Philipp von Gelber that is only remembered today because of Mozart's music:

Mozart: Thamos, King of Egypt, K. 345 - Entr'actes 1 and 2
Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos
Recorded December 3, 1940
Columbia Masterworks 11578-D, one 78-rpm record
Link (FLAC files, 17.33 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 9.67 MB)

Happy Birthday, Dimitri Mitropoulos!

Dimitri Mitropoulos

Tomorrow, March 1, is the birthday of the great Greek conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos (1896-1960), and so I present his first recording of a piece that was one of his specialties, the often-maligned "Scotch" Symphony of Mendelssohn. David Hall, in a supplement to his 1940 Record Book, confessed that this symphony was not a favorite of his among Mendelssohn's works, but that Mitropoulos' "arresting and revelatory reading" had forced him to revise his opinion!  And indeed Mitropoulos finds just the right blend of excitement and poetry in the piece:

Mendelssohn: Symphony No. 3 in A minor, Op. 56 ("Scotch")
Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos
Recorded December 6, 1941
Columbia Masterworks set MM-540, four 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC file, 86.58 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 39.98 MB)

This recording was made on the Saturday of that fateful weekend when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, drawing the USA into World War II; I'm sorry to say that this pressing was made under wartime conditions with recycled shellac, but I have done what I could with it.  Mitropoulos recorded the symphony again twelve years later, with the New York Philharmonic.

Cover design by Alex Steinweiss
(restored by Peter Joelson)

I was saddened yesterday to hear of the death of Van Cliburn, who had been suffering from bone cancer since last August.  His New York Philharmonic debut, in 1954, was under Mitropoulos' direction, and Cliburn is the only person I am aware of to repeat Mitropoulos' feat of simultaneously playing and conducting Prokofiev's Third Piano Concerto - once, at a concert memorializing Mitropoulos!

Cliburn's famous 1958 recording of the Tchaikovsky concerto, incidentally, appears to have been the last extended classical work ever to have been issued in a short-playing format - 3 extended-play 45s (RCA Victor set ERC-2252), with the first movement spread out over four sides just as it was in the days of 78s!

Bloch and Gould on Mercury Wing

This one's in response to a request.  One of my correspondents had expressed a desire to hear again Antal Dorati's performance, with the Minneapolis Symphony, of Morton Gould's "Spirituals for Orchestra," saying that this recording is superior not only to Walter Susskind's 1958 Everest recording (with the London Symphony, which can be heard on Youtube here and here) but even to Gould's own (with the Chicago Symphony)!  I don't know about the latter claim, since I don't know that recording, but it does seem to me that Dorati gets it right (and I would also add that he beats Rodzinski, who was one of the first to conduct the piece, and whose Columbia 78 set with the New York Philharmonic I used to have):

Morton Gould: Spirituals for Orchestra (1941)
Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra conducted by Antal Dorati
Recorded February 5-7, 1953
Side 2 of Mercury Wing MGW-14034, one LP record
Link (FLAC files, 51.65 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 29.61 MB)

This LP, which I found in my father's record collection, is a reissue, and the coupling is, it seems to me, a bit incongruous.  But it is the finest, most dynamic performance I think I have ever heard of Bloch's First (and, at the time this recording was made, only) Concerto Grosso:

Bloch: Concerto Grosso No. 1, for string orchestra with piano obbligato (1925)
Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Rafael Kubelik
with George Schick (piano)
Recorded April 23-24, 1951
Side 1 of Mercury Wing MGW-14034, one LP record
Link (FLAC files, 69.33 MB)
Link (FLAC files, 32.21 MB)

More from Ormandy

Two more vintage Ormandy recordings, one of them a request.  The request happens to be for the first-issued album set to bear Ormandy's name, his Minneapolis Symphony recording of Kodály's Háry János Suite.  Due to a loophole in the Minneapolis Symphony players' contracts, which allowed the orchestra's management to use them to make records for no additional payments, RCA Victor, within a relatively short time (a few weeks in the Januaries of 1934 and 1935), waxed an astounding 170-odd sides with the orchestra.  Among these were many first recordings, including first American recordings of Mahler and Bruckner symphonies, and this one of the Kodály suite:

Kodály: Háry János - Orchestral Suite
Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy
Recorded January 17, 1934
Victor Musical Masterpiece Set DM-197, three 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 72.69 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 39.62 MB)

Ormandy also recorded the Sibelius First Symphony in Minneapolis, but that isn't the version I have.  What I have is the remake he did in Philadelphia six years later, a set sent to me by Ken Halperin of Collecting Record Covers:

Sibelius: Symphony No. 1 in E minor, Op. 39
Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy
Recorded October 25, 1941
Victor Musical Masterpiece Set DM-881, four 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 104.2 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 58.64 MB)

Both these works share the following facts in Ormandy's discography: he recorded each four times, first in Minneapolis, then one mono and two stereo Philadelphia versions.  And of the two stereo versions, one was for Columbia and one for RCA.