Carl Orff

In this week's newsletter:

• New this week - Mengelberg's 1940 Beethoven recordings continue to offer stunning quality
  
• New this week - Carl Orff oversee's Sawallisch's 1956 German recording of Carmina Burana
  
• Editorial - Is the end truly nigh? Is the writing on the wall for the classical CD?
  
• PADA - Parts Five and Six of The History of the Cello: "French-Belgian Group"
  
• Recent Reviews:
  Mark Hambourg's Concerto recordings
  - "a tour de force on several levels despite the limits of the early sound technology"
  Mitropoulos conducts Mendelssohn Symphonies, Gould
  - "Mitropoulos admirers ... will find their conductor on energized form throughout, to put it mildly"
  

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Editorial - On the decline of the Classical CD

An article in the London Daily Telegraph caught my eye this week. Entitled “Is this the final curtain for classical records?”, the newspaper's opera critic Rupert Christiansen charts the dramatic, if not catastrophic, decline in classical CD sales in Britain. Christiansen notes that his predecessor at the Telegraph, Norman Lebrecht, regularly prophesied the death of the classical music industry as we know it, and he asks whether this is indeed now coming to pass?

Quoting figures from industry body the BPI, we discover that the classical share of the UK's CD market has declined from around 11% in 1990 to just 3.2% today, and that overall classical sales have fallen by an astonishing 17.6% during the last twelve months alone.

This is shocking stuff; at this rate the writing would appear to be very clearly on the wall for the classical CD as we know it, potentially ending a run of over a century of disc-based classical music releases. And while downloads are picking up some of the slack they certainly don't yet appear to be bringing in the revenues lost to the industry by the decline of the CD.

As Christiansen points out, it's not like there's a lack of interest in “serious” music (for want of a better term) – concerts remain well-attended, excellent music is still being written and performed – but the decline in sales of venerable publications such as Gramophone (which appears to have relaunched three or four times over the last six years) and the struggles of similar publications suggests to me that something is certainly afoot, something I remember discussing some time ago with Peter Harrison as we planned the setting up of Pristine Classical back in 2004.

The give-away line in the Telegraph article, for me, is this:

“HNH, parent company of Naxos, has also lost heavily, down from 11.7% in 2004 to 7.2% last year, as the super-budget label concentrates on relatively esoteric repertoire”

Now, Naxos had a great business model when I started buying its CDs in the 1980s – recording inexpensive ensembles and artists from the newly-accessible countries of the former Soviet Bloc in eastern Europe to build up rapidly a comprehensive and entirely digital catalogue of the core repertoire, whilst hugely undercutting the rest of the industry on sales price and tapping previously non-existent markets and outlets for classical music.

For certain record executives it's this which, they seem to believe, has been the root cause of their own gloomy sales figures; no doubt the full-price labels lost a lot of customers to Naxos. But ultimately (I suspect) Naxos too have now reached something like the end of the same production line as many before them: ask yourself how many more recordings of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik we really need from the Albanian National Symphony Orchestra, whatever the price?

And when you've run out of things to record that are likely to sell (be it in repertoire or artists) where do you go next? The classical catalogue is hugely bloated, with zillions of recordings of almost any work that's likely to conjure an audience big enough to justify a CD pressing run; the more esoteric stuff remains just that, and struggles to break out of double figures sales-wise – it would appear there are no truly forgotten composers left who have yet to be rediscovered and appreciated anew by a vast, mass audience. And in the media age of the early twenty-first century it strikes me that the young musicians I see in the music press have been selected for maximum exposure at least as much for their looks as for their talent.

But is there more to it than this? A brilliant young pianist in the 1950s had the world at his (or just possibly her) feet purely on the grounds of talent. A vast repertoire beckoned – what had been recorded already (and there was still much that hadn't) could only be found in the crackly world of the shellac disc; now hi-fi, and then stereo, had truly arrived, together with a sizeable audience, eager to fill their shelves first with vinyl and then, later, with shiny silver discs.

Contrast this with today: The beautiful young violinist finds herself (or just possibly himself) pitted as a performer against the giants of the last eighty years. Thanks to advances in restoration technology which have revived the recordings of musicians who've been living on in the memories of the few the list of readily available, pre-recorded alternatives grows on a weekly basis. How much can a young musician really say with Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto that's not been said on a disc before, without venturing into interpretations that are either bizarre or absurd, or looking at minutiae of performance that the average listener is quite likely to miss? We're into the law of diminishing returns here, are we not? (I await a rush of e-mails which seek to convince me otherwise!)

These are fundamental questions about the music business to which I have no answers – I have the pleasure of running a (very) small, specialist music business in such a way as to provide myself with a living and an endless source of pleasure, and long may that continue. But I do wonder how such a supersaturated marketplace can expect indefinite expansion – or indeed survival – along the lines of what the major record companies have produced in the past. The technological leaps and bounds that wowed previous generations of music-lovers every 25 years or so have surely reached their limit, and these days our “big improvements” in audio quality seem to be more a numbers game – of bit-depth, sampling rates and multiple channels – than anything as fundamental as the first use of a microphone instead of a horn, or the switch-over from analogue to digital, where the sonic differences were immediately clear for anyone and everyone to hear.

Does this therefore mean the near-end of the classical recording industry as we've known it? Perhaps not just yet. But it's surely going to get harder and harder to recoup the massive costs on the kind of large-scale recordings that have traditionally sold best, and I suspect the turnover of bright new things and mass-marketing gimmicks is only going to get ever faster and seem ever more irrelevant – Il Divo, anyone? It's just over ten years since I visited a serious and very highly respected British record company then in the throes of a Vaughan Williams symphony cycle which was costing around £50,000 per recording to make and might, they hoped, break even in a decade or so – five years later that same company was busy downsizing and rewriting its business plan...

I can't help but agree, and finish these thoughts, with the concluding line of the Telegraph article:

“It has to be said loud and clear: the CD is about to go the way of the word processor and fax machine.”

Those who ignore this and resist the switch to downloading and what the online industry dubs “intangible goods” – raw data such as MP3s and FLACs – do so at their own peril. It seems that, at a quite astonishing pace, the times they really are a-changing.

Andrew Rose

Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra
conductor Willem Mengelberg
Recorded live in 1940, Amsterdam

Recorded in April/October 1940 at the Concertgebouw, by AVRO Radio
Transfers from Philips LPs 0697 010 and 6597 009 in the Pristine collection
XR remastering by Andrew Rose at Pristine Audio, May-June 2010
Cover artwork based on a photograph of Willem Mengelberg at the Concertgebouw

Total duration: 71:09 
©2010 Pristine Audio.

For more download and CD options, see our website

The FLAC downloads:

New release today:

ORFF Carmina Burana

Pristine Audio PACO 044

Agnes Giebel, soprano
Marcel Cordes, baritone
Paul Kuén, tenor
Chorus of the Westdeustchen Rundfunk
Cologne Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester
conductor Wolfgang Sawallisch

Transfer from UK Columbia LP 33CX1480 in the Pristine Audio collection
XR remastering by Andrew Rose at Pristine Audio, May 2010
Cover artwork based on a photograph of Wolfgang Sawallisch

Total duration: 57:11
©2010 Pristine Audio.

For more download and CD options, see our website

The FLAC downloads:

Sawallisch brilliant - under the personal supervision of Orff

A vivid and delightful XR-remastered 1956 Carmina Burana

 

• ORFF - Carmina Burana - Cantiones profanae [notes]
  Agnes Giebel, soprano
  Marcel Cordes, baritone
  Paul Kuén, tenor
  
  Chorus of the Westdeustchen Rundfunk
  Chorus-master: Bernhard Zimmerman
  
  Cologne Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester
  conductor Wolfgang Sawallisch
  Recorded in 1956 under the personal supervision of Carl Orff
  
  

ORFF: Carmina Burana

It's not often that a composer is present for the recording of a major popular classical work, one which is regularly programmed and is guaranteed to pack out a concert hall - even less so that the composer gets full billing for the recording being made under his "personal supervision".

So this, therefore, is a Carmina Burana to be taken seriously. And what a fine recording it turns out to be - under the expert baton of Wolfgang Sawallisch the orchestra, choir and soloists deliver an excellent performance.

This new transfer, thanks to XR remastering, captures better than ever the vivid dynamism of this 20th Century masterpiece.

1. O Fortuna

Technical notes:

Regular readers of our weekly newsletter will know that Pristine recently took delivery of a large collection of classical vinyl discs, and over the last few weeks I've been sifting through them, pulling out interesting recordings and then checking for references to them on the Internet.

The Orff caught my eye thanks to the inclusion on the front cover, in bold capitals, of the line 'RECORDED UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF CARL ORFF'. Searching for references to this I ended up at a site which claims to be “the definitive web site” for this particular piece of music, and indeed, there's a reference to the Sawallisch recording right there.

More than that though, it reads (to me at least) as something of a challenge:

“There is a historical recording from the mid 1950's made in Orff's presence in which everybody puts in a lot of effort which is loudly applauded by Carl Orff himself on the last track but the quality of the recording means that we can't really evaluate it against later recordings.”

To be honest, having read that I thought I'd be in for something of a challenge, technically speaking, but no, this was a respectable recording for 1956; given that there is no applause present, at least on the British release (the site refers to a Capitol issue, which I assume is the US release though the site itself is based in Australia).

Anyway, having cleaned and transferred the LP I thought I might as well continue and see what a touch of XR remastering would do for it – generally the disc was in excellent condition, with only the odd click here and there needing my direct attention.

In fact the initial XR remastering was so successful that I decided to carry on with the recording and prepare it for full release. It is already available on CD elsewhere, and I have no idea whether the current issue is any improvement over the LP, but I'm more than pleased enough with how my own work has brought the very best out of this perhaps definitive (supervised by Carl Orff, remember!) performance, with frequency extension both at the bottom and top end of the range. Furthermore, where previously it was a little harsh and forward in the upper mid-range, there is now a much fuller and more convincing overall tonal balance.

Overall an excellent recording of this major work, with the Ambient Stereo version to be particularly recommended.

Technical notes by Andrew Rose

 

Available as 320kbps MP3, 16-bit mono FLAC, CD
or listen on demand with Pristine Audio Direct Access (PADA)

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New MP3 transfers at PADA Exclusives
by Dr. John Duffy
in Ambient Stereo

History of the Cello Vols. 5 & 6: "French-Belgian Group"  Paul Tortelier Featuring Cellists: Maurice Marechal Paul Tortelier Gerard Hekking Horace Britt Adolfe Frezin Andre-Levy Marix Loevesohn   Part of a ten-volume series charting the historic recordings of cello music in the 78rpm era, replete with rare and important recordings by the greatest players of the first half of the 20th Century.   This History of the Cello series follows our earlier PADA Exclusives presentation of collections from the Thomas Clear limited edition LP transfer releases, for which we can now also supply scans of Clear-s original typewritten notes: History of Chamber Music:   History of the Violin:   This transfer is presented with Ambient Stereo remastering by Dr. John Duffy. Over 400 PADA Exclusives recordings are available for high-quality streamed listening and free 224kbps MP3 download to all subscribers. Remastered by  Dr John Duffy In Ambient Stereo

Download or stream this recording and many others from only One Euro a week!

Hundreds of historic recordings are available for listening and free MP3 download
  to subscribers to PADA Exclusives, our €1/week streamed audio service.

Other subscription offers give you full access to our entire online catalogue

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Pick of the reviews

AUDIOPHILE AUDITION

Karajan in New York, Vol. 2
WEBERN: Five Pieces, Op. 5;
MOZART: Symphony No. 41 in C Major, K. 551 “Jupiter”;
BEETHOVEN: Symphony No. 1 in C Major, Op. 21

New York Philharmonic/Herbert von Karajan

Pristine Audio PASC 224, 63:06 [4 stars]


Herbert von Karajan (1908-1989) led a series of concerts in New York City, and I recall attending one of them with his leading the Berlin Philharmonic. Here, in his New York Philharmonic radio debut (15 November 1958), Karajan leads a German-Viennese program, opening with Anton Webern’s Five Pieces for String Orchestra (1929), arranged from his earlier (1909) String Quartet.  

The Op. 5 of Webern, typically, offers five concerted movements, the music pulverized into tiny motifs and rhythmic kernels, extremely intense and even lyrical, in their own terms. The last of them, especially, becomes quite expressive, with violin and viola riffs, and high aching pedal tones in the upper reaches of emotional anguish. The deep basses cede their harmonies to plucked notes, growls, groans, and weeping figures spread around the range of stringed instruments. The landscape becomes both burnt and haunted, an eerie commentary on 20th Century sensibilities, intoned by a responsive NY Philharmonic String ensemble.

The Jupiter Symphony, despite its obviously heraldic content, begins rather modestly and soberly, lyricism rather than pageantry on the menu. Despite some distant (AM radio) sonics, the intensity of the performance shines through, the secondary theme in lilting colors, the counterpoint in firm control. The woodwinds, too, make their presence felt in the midst of the more titanic energies tossed among the strings and tympani. Altogether, the Karajan approach to the first movement emphasizes lightness of texture and a taut melodic line, unbroken in its arched directionality. The linear serenity extends into the Andante, in which something of the Toscanini impetus prevails, focused but unsentimental, the phrase-ends clipped. A soft ambiance marks the Menuetto, eminently Viennese and exalted in tone, the phrases the soul of harmonized symmetry. Virtuosity rules in the Finale: Allegro with its quick tempo, the woodwinds and low strings having to hustle thorough their riffs accurately but breathlessly. The grandiose whirlwind  pomp of the contrapunctus manages to convey a fevered joie de vivre, a ceremonial nobility of an inflamed order, typical of the Karajan who thought himself the “pope of music.”

The Beethoven First (22 November 1958), from the outset, evolves as a measured affair, quite attentive to Beethoven’s harmonic procedures, which love to delay the tonic resolution. Karajan’s linear propulsion reigns, the textures light and streamlined, the conception majestic on its own terms. We sense Beethoven’s youthful brio in handling orchestral figures on a momentous scale, an ardent wielder of thunder and lightning. A forceful tempo commands the Andante sostenuto, played for its sturm und drang potential. This is a Romantic’s early Beethoven, with little care for the niceties of authentic performance. One of them is the more ominous and athletic Menuetto, the type of fiery Menuet that already evinces signs of rebellion against the polite society that gave it birth. Attacca to the last movement, playful but decidedly intent on its explosive means, again in the Toscanini manner of rhythmic propulsion and fleet textures in the Mannheim rockets that saturate the score. As they had at the end of the prior concert’s Mozart, the audience, too, erupts with resounding enthusiasm to their honored, if controversial, guest conductor.

-- Gary Lemco

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