The Prospect Before Us

THERE is always, and naturally, something a little sad about the end of an era. We are now at the end of an era in recorded music. A bright and lively one it has been, if only ten years long. It yielded an immense variety of musical treasure to our living rooms, this LP decade, and has been a time of fine musical adventure. Its twilight was signaled, in grim stereophonic silence, two months ago, when the October issue of the Schwann record catalogue deluged us with a shower of black diamonds (the Schwann symbols for records no longer available).

The main agent of this vanishment was RCA Victor — a statement which compels a digression and an exoneration. The removals were serious. I need say no more than that they involved such irreplaceable items as the thirty-two Beethoven sonatas played by Schnabel and the

Purcell Dido and Aeneas sung by Flagstad. Still, the company was not much to blame, and the advent of stereo hardly more. The process is worth explaining, since this is not the last purge we will observe as stereo marches on, and the complexity of the record business will help speed the destruction.

RCA Victor used to have an exchange agreement with His Master’s Voice, the British company that originated Dido and the Schnabel Beethoven records. This come to an end last year, and HMV has bought Capitol as its American branch. Victor’s sales right to HMV originals apparently is expiring. HMV cannot export English pressings direct to America, because Victor has exclusive use here of the HMV trademark, the little dog Nipper. HMV could reissue the deleted records in this country under the Capitol label, but will it? I incline to think not. Victor has skimmed the cream off the collectors’ market. Further sales — of anything non-stereophonic — might not be enough to justify printing new labels.

This is the dark side of the pictured. All we can do about it is shop now for what may be collectors’ items in a year or so.

Now to the bright side, and excitingly bright it is. In late months I have spent many hours listening to music stereophonically reproduced, from tape and from discs, through ready-made phonographs and through custom high fidelity arrays. Now I can advance firmly an opinion put forth tentatively before. Stereo separates the sheep from the goats, and promptly.

Take a good record — let us say the Debussy Images pour Orchestre on London CS-6013 — and play it on good stereo equipment. (It need not be very expensive equipment, by the way; modest merit comes into its own here.) If the listening room is reasonably good, you will not be conscious of two loudspeakers, or, indeed, of any loudspeakers at all. You will hear the good Swiss orchestra in its own hall, in sound not so much startling as natural. Should this not happen, the reproducing equipment is either inadequate or improperly disposed.

Stereo records display similar unmitigated contrast between good and bad. Here I am speaking, of course, about sonic and not musical matters. There are at least three different ways to make stereo recordings. Any of them can be botched, turning a good performance into a bad recording. Perhaps more to the point

is the fact that any of them can (and, so far, do) show up a bad performance as what it is. A case in point is a recent recording of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. In its monophonic version, by dint of some knob twisting at the engineer’s console, it was made to sound impressive. Doubtless, in the making of the stereophonic version the same work at the control panel was applied, but to no avail. When one listens to the finished record, it becomes patent at once that the orchestra was seriously short of strings (an economy not uncommon until now), and the performance, in consequence, emerges not only as unimpressive but as almost ridiculous.

In other words, we are going to be assured now of a little more honesty in the studio. A new consideration in aural judgment has come into play: the sound of the recording hall. No longer will it be easy to bring the soprano with a little, tinny voice up close to the microphone and lend to her dynamics like those of Mesdames Flagstad or Farrell. No longer can the microphones be homed on violin sections of five men apiece, making them sound as big as the magnificently trained regiments of the Boston Symphony or the Vienna Philharmonic. I suppose it would be foolhardy to say that hi-fi fakcry in record making is at an end, but certainly it has become more difficult. And, for the music lover, what is pleasantest in this general development is this: while the bad is discovered through a new display of shortcomings, the good is being given a true hue and fullness it never has enjoyed before.

There is a secondary effect, involving a process not ordinarily much thought about. An important part of every recording session is the portion-by-portion playback, in which the artist hears himself. Now he hears himself in stereo. Whereas he used to listen mainly for wrong notes or omissions (“What happened to the second flute there?”), he now has begun to listen for the whole sound; he has moved into the audience. This is a very good thing. Toscanini and Weingartner surely would have appreciated this advantage, but it came too late for them. Markevitch and Bernstein and Leinsdorf will prove its value.

Perhaps I can clarify this further by pointing out that through the monophonic hi-fi era — which can probably be safely extended back beyond the LP decade to the period of electrical 78-rpm recording made glorious by Leopold Stokowski — musicians, and especially orchestral conductors, developed musical approaches specifically for the recording process. There was a difference between the ways in which they played the same work in concert and in the recording studio.

This was not universal, of course. I am convinced, for instance, that Toscanini had trouble in thinking of music as affective, except in the degree that it affected him; he identified himself with it in performance and forgot that anyone else was listening. This was a singular interpretive virtue, but yielded us occasionally some odd sound: the discrete voice of the orchestra as heard from the conductor’s platform. There have been other instances, different but kindred, of independence from the microphone. The pianists Artur Schnabel and Edwin Fischer, for another example, seem not to have bothered themselves overmuch about digital inaccuracies when satisfied with their conveyance of musical concepts. But most recording artists, from the evidence, have (at least in recent years) felt genuine concern over phonographic effectiveness. Accordingly there has been a tendency among them to shorten pauses (because you could not see them ready to swoop) and to emphasize accents (for fear the triangle would get lost in the general tumult) and in general to concentrate on detail at the expense of cumulative effect: the sense of the music. They cannot be blamed for this. Music is in some degree a theatric art, wherein it is up to the performer to compel the attention of the listener; if the attention escapes, it is the performer’s fault.

The direction the performers have followed in establishing their recording techniques during the monophonic hi-fi era has depended on the testimony of their own ears. For want of sonic perspective, they have sometimes banged, blasted, or bellowed. Naturally they have been encouraged in this by recording directors and engineers, but they themselves have felt a need to heighten emphasis when dealing with the implacable microphone and the restrictive loudspeaker.

From now on they will not have to. Our ears (and the artists’ too) are happiest when performing all their functions, which include that of direction finding. When they can do so, they will less strongly demand overbuilt dynamics and overintimacy with instruments and voices. In other words, our reproduced music now can become much more natural than it has ever been before without losing conviction. No longer need there be the polar choice between bright and subdued.

This is not to say that stereophonic techniques cannot be and will not be abused. The ping-pong effect, in which the sound is popped from one loudspeaker to the other, is with us now and will continue to be. Some people enjoy this trickery, just as they do the product of echo chambers. Let them. The standards will rise regardless.

It was in my mind as I started this column to ask for a return to the adventurous spirit which informed the beginning of the LP era in 1948. We got sonic wonderful things which advanced the musical cognizance of the home listener far beyond that of his concertgoing counterpart. Hermann Scherchen, for Westminster, gave us Haydn symphonies we never had heard before, and Vanguard smothered us delightfully with Bach cantatas. These firms now have outgrown their designation as small companies; they can afford to record Beethoven and Tchaikovsky symphonies in competition with Victor, Columbia, and London, and to try to sell them in the mass market.

We have no lack, however, of audacious new starters. Shortly we will be offered, by a pair of today’s small companies, a selection from the Scotch and Irish songs of Beethoven and from the excellent music written by the relatives of Johann Sebastian Bach. And some advances made in the LP era never will be lost. Completeness, for one thing, is here to stay. By the time you read this, you will probably be able to buy the Handel organ concertos, not in part but in toto (and of course in stereo). A couple of the best of these have been unavailable for years. At least one whole opera of Wagner’s Ring cycle, painstakingly made by the best Wagnerians in the business, will be forthcoming soon. At this moment, the latest hope of American opera, Barber’s Vanessa, is being readied for the lists. I foresee no artistic retreat. You will be able to buy stereophonic airplane sounds if you want, but you will also be able in go broke on Vivaldi, a delectable prospect if ever there was one.

To come full circle, there is one dubious hope which the record companies may or may not fulfill as the new era begins. Consider the losses mentioned in paragraph two; Dido and the Beethoven sonatas. There is an abundance of ladies who can sing Dido badly, many of them under recording contracts. But will we have a search to find a good Dido, and a good supporting cast and director? (I have a feeling Blanche Thebom might fill the bill.) And who is to be our latter-day Schnabel? Some of our big-name recitalists know some of the Beethoven sonatas; few know them all. A man who does, to my mind quite profoundly, is Jacob Lateiner, who has no recording contract at all. The record companies are now in a posture of binaural alertness. Let them know your wants.

Record Reviews

Bach: Concertos Nos. I and 2 for Violin; Concerto for Two Violins

Wolfgang Schneiderhan, violin; Rudolf Baumgartner conducting Festival Strings Lucerne; Deutsche Grammophon Archive ARC-3099

Baumgartner does double duty here, playing second fiddle in the Double Concerto as well as conducting, and to such effect that this is the best Double Concerto in the catalogues. The A Minor and E Major Concertos also are as good as any offered elsewhere. Heifetz, for Victor, may get a little more brilliance into his recordings of them, but Schneiderhan has warmth and grace enough to compensate, and much better engineering to help him out.

Brahms: Piano Concerto No. 1

Leon Fleisher, piano; George Szell conducting Cleveland Orchestra; Fpic BC1003 (stereo) and LC-3484 Dual honors here: this becomes at once the topmost Brahms First Concerto in the lists, superseding the Backhaus-London by virtue of sound, and the first piano concerto to be presented really convincingly in stereo. The piano does not protrude and neither is it split in two. It is a solid entity in middle distance. This fits well with Brahms’s purposes and Fleisher’s execution. This young pianist is a master of subtlety, and so is George Szell. The latter naturally controlled the performance; hence we have a classic drama in many voices, a sumptuous variety. To either stereo or monophonic version you must listen closely, but you will be well rewarded. The sound is rich and tastefully restrained.

Mendelssohn : Symphonies No. 4, “Italian,” and No. 5, “Reformation”

Charles Munch conducting Boston Symphony Orchestra; RCA Victor LSC-2221 (stereo) and LM-2221

The Bostonians have held a sort of pre-emption on these two symphonies in our generation, challenged only by Toscanini. Koussevitzky could play the “Italian” better than anyone else; Munch’s special property is the “Reformation.” Here are two splendid displays of the BSO at its glistering best, the merits being especially discernible in the stereo version. Flutist Doriot Dwyer leading into A Mighty Fortress in the “Reformation” Symphony must be heard to be believed. Angelic is the word.

Prokofiev: Peter and the Wolf; Lieutenant Kije

Boris Karloff, narrator; Mario Rossi conducting Vienna State Opera Orchestra; Vanguard VSD-2010 (stereo) and VRS1028

Nearly everyone in public life has narrated Peter and the Wolf for records, including Mrs. Roosevelt. Almost no one has done it badly, but no one else has done it quite so winningly as Boris Karloff. He fares as well in the stereophonic as in the monophonic version, coming to life in the middle of your wall, with the orchestra modestly disposed behind him. On the overside we have Lieutenant Kije portrayed as a very mild-mannered scamp by Mr. Rossi. The sound is good, but there isn’t much bite in the playing.

Puccini: Madama Butterfly

Erich Leinsdorf conducting Anna Moffo, Cesare Valletti, Rosalind Elias, Fernando Corena, other singers; Rome Opera Orchestra and Chorus; RCA Victor LSC-6135 (stereo) and LM-6135: three records

All in all, Leinsdorf has put together here the best made of any Butterfly on records. His only difficulty is the usual one: the Butterfly, Anna Moffo, sings too hard and competently, just as did Callas and Tebaldi in their versions. Butterfly must be feckless, Grace Moore had the idea; I wish someone else would get it. Still, this is a lovely job — the bonus player being Miss Elias as Suzuki — and the sound, especially in the ensembles via stereo, is admirable.

Stereophonic

These are stereo disc versions of recordings issued earlier in monophonic edition.

Debussy: Images pour Orchestre

Ataulfo Argent a conducting Orchestre de la Suisse Romande; London CS-6013 In the early course of a new departure, an occasional enthusiastic excursion must be allowed the critic who has been long on watch. Under these rules, let me say I think this is the best stereophonic recording that has yet been offered on discs. It entrances.

Mozart : The Marriage of Figaro

Erich Kleiber conducting Cesare Siepi, Hilde Gueden, Lisa Della Casa, Alfred Poell, other singers; Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and State Opera Chorus; London OSA-1402: four records

Praise with no stint was poured on this recorded performance when it came forth two years ago, before Kleiber’s death. It is a pleasure to hail it again. Many a listener, including this one, considers The Marriage of Figaro the finest opera ever written, and surely never have I heard it performed so beautifully as by Kleiber’s cast here. For readers who obeyed earlier behests and bought the monophonic version, let it be said that the arias are as good in one mode as the other. So, in the main, are the choral portions. Where the stereo technique makes plain its boon is in the recitative dialogues. I must admit that the talk-song through this opera — two voices, usually, and a harpsichord — attains in the stereo recording a dramatic excitement it never had gained before even in the opera house. This must have been an early stereo effort, when techniques were daring. The microphone swoop over the orchestra in the wedding march could have been disastrous, but it wasn’t. It was a triumph. In fact, the whole recording is a triumph.