Historical

Decca was on the ball in the Fifties – the same virtues adorn the Belgian soprano SUZANNE DANCO’s records. A fine Mélisande, she is completely at home with Debussy’s Villon and Bilitis; miraculously, she finds nine different shades of rapture for Fauré’s La bonne chanson.

The Wigmore Hall recently celebrated Cuénod’s 101st birthday. And Britain also gave honour, if slowly, to our own prophetess of French song, soprano MAGGIE TEYTE (born Tate, in Wolverhampton).

Haven’t quite cracked French song yet? Here are the voices that did it for me and, I guarantee, will do it for you. No, stronger than that: this is a treasure trove and, if you’re at all susceptible to the ancient art of marrying poetry to music, it will charm, disarm, delight, ravish, transport and move you deeply. Remarkably, only one of these singers was French-born.

Casals and Beecham dominate the present batch. Music & Arts has released a 13-CD set devoted to the CASALS FESTIVAL AT PRADES.

Some of these performances will be familiar from previous Sony/CBS compilations but others – the Arthur Grumiaux-William Kapell Beethoven D major Sonata, Op. 12/1; the Mozart E flat Piano Quartet (erroneously described as a Piano Trio) in which they are joined by Milton Thomas and Paul Tortelier; Mieczyslaw Horszowski playing some Bach preludes and fugues – will be discoveries for many music lovers. 

Take the two lovers of an 18th-century Spanish señora, conceal them in a clock cabinet, set the whole comical fiasco to music of unprecedented delicacy; then record it under the auspices of the composer with a characterful line-up of performers, and you have the basis of a truly historic recording – funny, eloquent and atmospheric. The composer is of course Ravel, the work, his one-act opera L’heure espagnole and the conductor is Georges Truc.

The playing has immense character and most of the remaining programme follows suit. It’s much the sort of thing you’d have expected from Leopold Stokowski, except that even he could occasionally turn the tables and dish up food without dressing – as indeed he does for much of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, the Scherzo especially.

Pearl’s well-transferred anthology highlights two major aspects of Pablo Casals’s musicianship (a third, as composer, is displayed in other collections), where heart-rending morceaux sit comfortably next to characterful orchestral performances with the LSO. That was in 1928-30, some twenty years before the formation of the Hollywood String Quartet and a recording of Walton’s Quartet that moved the composer himself to write: ‘I hope no one ever records my Quartet again, because you captured so exactly what I wanted...’

Some years earlier, Willem Mengelberg had encouraged a collaboration between the New York Symphony and Philharmonic Orchestras. Selected fruits of that auspicious merger are thrillingly audible on Biddulph’s generous album; they are central to Mengelberg’s much-underrated RCA legacy, whereas Serge Koussevitzky’s (with the Boston Symphony) has earned greater acclaim.

Lehmann’s voice was, and still is, relatively familiar; but what about Petrograd-born Kyra Vayne, a fine but virtually unknown soprano who has lived in London since 1924? She broadcast here during the war and her vibrant, well-focused and above all feminine voice has great appeal. Postwar, pianist Walter Gieseking was most closely associated, at least in Britain, with Debussy, but a German wartime Emperor Concerto (recorded in genuine stereo) combines poise and athleticism, albeit pitted by anti-aircraft fire during the cadenza.

Oscar Levant’s Piano Concerto sounds like a hectic synthesis of Gershwin and Schoenberg and reflects – according to its composer – ‘an arrogance and pretentiousness based on an economic and emotional insecurity [of the late Thirties]’. Levant goes on to add, somewhat quizzically perhaps, that ‘these are days we now look back on as happy’. And you can hear why, on Oscar Levant plays Levant and Gershwin, although the sound itself tends to crumble at climaxes.

Pearl’s well-transferred anthology highlights two major aspects of Pablo Casals’s musicianship (a third, as composer, is displayed in other collections), where heart-rending morceaux sit comfortably next to characterful orchestral performances with the LSO.

Take the two lovers of an 18th-century Spanish señora, conceal them in a clock cabinet, set the whole comical fiasco to music of unprecedented delicacy; then record it under the auspices of the composer with a characterful line-up of performers, and you have the basis of a truly historic recording – funny, eloquent and atmospheric.

Take the two lovers of an 18th-century Spanish señora, conceal them in a clock cabinet, set the whole comical fiasco to music of unprecedented delicacy; then record it under the auspices of the composer with a characterful line-up of performers, and you have the basis of a truly historic recording – funny, eloquent and atmospheric.

Arturo Toscanini was just 15 when Liszt completed his final tone poem, From the Cradle to the Grave. Almost sixty years later, the venerated maestro directed his only NBC broadcast of the work – a lean, ethereal affair, eloquently phrased. Dell’Arte do their best with the 1941 sound, while the remaining programme (which includes Liszt’s Orpheus and Paul Graener’s neo-classical The Flute of Sans-Souci) substantially extends our experience of Toscanini’s art.

I’d learned and loved Furtwängler’s Second long before I delved beneath the gritty surface of Vaughan Williams’s Fourth, a work that still occasionally draws a blank. However, once exposed to the obvious commitment, directness and integrity of the composer’s own 1937 recording, any doubts soon vanished. Still, I have to admit that the Fifth strikes me as an altogether finer work, one that compares favourably with the best of Holst, Delius and Elgar.

There’s certainly no substitute for inspired leadership, which is perhaps why the Vienna Philharmonic responded so lovingly to Wilhelm Furtwängler – even to the conductor’s own Second Symphony, a powerful, eighty-minute synthesis of Brucknerian gesture and fin de siècle rhetoric that’s often superior, at least in my view, to other late-Romantic symphonies that are currently being touted as ‘underrated’. Some thirty years after first hearing this piece, I could still remember the tunes.

Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, however, is rather less impressive and a famous 1937 broadcast of Ravel’s left-hand Concerto with Paul Wittgenstein is more well-meant than well-aimed. That’s with the Concertgebouw Orchestra, whose regular maestro, Willem Mengelberg, makes a Wagnerian meal out of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, one that’s as artful as Walter’s Schumann but many times more wilful.

One of the ubiquitous Ward Marston’s most valuable recent projects is a disc of ‘rare and unpublished recordings, 1938-52’ from the MARIAN ANDERSON Archives at the Library of the University of Pennsylvania.

The high point of Deutsche Grammophon’s Centenary Collection volume GREAT VOICES OF THE EARLY YEARS (defined here as 1925-47) is the classic Winterreise by tenor Peter Anders and pianist Michael Raucheisen (459 009-2); their discipline and imaginations allow them to find endless variety in subtle shades of despair. I confess to being a bit let down by the rest of the set.

TIANA LEMNITZ (1897-1994), a mainstay of the Berlin State Opera from 1934 to 1957, remains one of the most admirable German lyric sopranos on record.

Her EMI Références disc devoted to operatic arias and duets recorded between 1938 and 1948 reveals a singer with exemplary legato, the ability to file the voice down to a sumptuously floated piano, and an occasionally magical intimacy of expression.