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“… we can find much to enjoy … the playing is romantic and glowing … is surprisingly sensitive in the ethereal music …”
Gramophone
“Minimalism sounds good on CD. So hypnotic is the music’s effect … your attention can focus completely on the musical processes themselves.”
Gramophone
“The playing is indeed exceptional … the sound is splendid, with an ideal balance of warmth and clarity … the performance offers more wit, fantasy and sheer fun than any I’ve heard …”
Gramophone
“Grumiaux comes closer than any other violinist I have heard to an ideal performance … There is a kind of honesty to Bach’s intentions here … that I find deeply impressive and often very exciting.”
Gramophone
“The interpretation and performance are as
good as their reputations would lead you to hope …
they play together very well indeed. In the page of adagio which opens the Kreutzer, Perlman … is quite magnificient. Technically, this performance is second to none …”
Gramophone
“There is wonderful playing here, inspired by insight and qualities of intellectual inquiry and rigour … but
you wouldn’t expect anything less form Alfred Brendel, would you? … this is Brendel at his very best.”
Gramophone
“Gardiner captures the quintessentially Viennese
flavour … the choir produces some direct and richly
expressive singing, with every individual phrase shaped
with immense care and sensitivity.”
Gramophone
“… one of the finest Four Seasons ever put on disc …
I never enjoyed Vivaldi so muc h”
Gramophone
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Decca Music Group, which comprises the Decca and Philips labels, are collecting some of their landmark recordings and reproducing them with unprecedented fidelity on CD under “The Originals” banner. All analogue recordings have been newly re-mastered using the latest 96 kHz 24-bit technology whilst later recordings are presented as original digital transfers. This series of critically acclaimed performances features the great Decca and Philips artists, past and present: celebrated interpreters whose recording careers flourished before the advent of the CD, as well as truly original artists still active with the labels today whose earlier achievements are celebrated here in one major series. The Originals will initially feature 30 leading recordings with more to follow later in 2006.
Decca (London Records in the USA) was the first company to launch the Long Playing Record in Britain, some two years or so before the HMV, Columbia and Parlophone labels that comprised the EMI Group embraced the new format. The early LPs included new issues such as the Jensen account of Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony on Decca and the two Mozart Piano Quartets with Clifford Curzon and members of the Amadeus Quartet. The advantages of the new medium were as obvious as the excellence of their engineering was astonishing. So, too, were the benefits of stereo when at the end of the 1950s it began to displace mono reproduction. These were the days when the recorded repertoire began to proliferate abundantly and Decca was at the forefront. The LP opened up the catalogue to works like Parsifal and Die Meistersinger which the cumbersome 78 r.p.m. format had found unwieldy. (The Third Act of Die Meistersinger conducted by Karl Böhm had run to 30 sides!) With LP and stereo, large scale works could be more easily encompassed and with stereo, the greater naturalness and sense of space was an inestimable boon.
One work that gripped the imagination of the wider musical public in the early 1960s was Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. Britten’s idea had been to interleaf into the Latin liturgy of the Requiem, the war poetry of Wilfred Owen and to use soloists from three of the recently warring nations, a German baritone in the person of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, a Russian soprano in Galina Vishnevskaya and a British tenor, Peter Pears. It was not only an artistic success but a commercial one, selling in huge quantities and far exceeding expectations. John Culshaw, with his engineer, the incomparable Kenneth Wilkinson (“Wilkie”), who made so many classic Decca sets, was at pains to position the main forces and the separate chamber group for the Owen poems, very precisely. The three soloists were all at their very finest: as the Gramophone magazine put it, “[with] Pears incomparable in inflecting the composer’s characteristic word-setting, Fischer-Dieskau producing honeyed tones and equally clear words, Vishnevskaya bringing out the monumental quality of the Latin solos, this Britten recording, one which will never be superseded, remains among the most magnetic performances of British music ever put on record”. Well, it retains its unique authority and astonishing presence.
Versions of each standard work rarely exceeded half a dozen, and those brought up on six records for the Berlioz Symphonie fantastique from Bruno Walter or Weingartner, were relieved to have to make only one turn over for the LP. Sir Colin Davis’s 1961 recording with the LSO long reigned supreme and was surpassed only by his 1974 version with the Concertgebouw. Three decades later, it remains a viable first recommendation in the latest Penguin Guide! He includes the cornet part, first revived by Klemperer in the 1960s, and observes the first movement exposition repeat usually omitted.
It is difficult for present-day collectors to realise that the Mahler symphonies were still rarities both in the concert hall and on records. The June 1961 catalogue for example did not list Nos. 3 or 6, and only one version each of Nos. 8 and 9, both of them mono. The position was quite different a decade later when the Eighth with its gigantic forces was recorded by a distinguished team of soloists, the Vienna State Opera Chorus, the Vienna Boys Choir and the Chicago Orchestra under Sir Georg Solti. When Horenstein conducted a 1959 performance there was a tremendous sense of occasion for this was a great rarity in the concert hall. It is a measure of the Solti recording that it also conveys this same sense of occasion even though performances were more commonplace. The Gramophone magazine called it “one of the most convincing performances of the symphony imaginable” and the grandeur and majesty of Solti’s conception sounds wonderfully vivid even after thirty-five years, and in the Penguin Guide it still retains its first listing.
In the 1960s only the last three Dvorák symphonies were represented by more than one disc. Decca’s survey of all nine by the gifted and, alas, short-lived Hungarian István Kertész (1929–73) eclipsed all competition for their freshness and spontaneity, and the complete naturalness of the recorded sound that Ray Minshull (who was to take over from Culshaw, when the latter left to be head of music at BBC TV) and the legendary “Wilkie” achieved. It serves as a reminder, too, of the excellence of the Kingsway Hall acoustic in which so many great recordings were made. These 1963 and 1966 recordings still hold their own against the abundance of rivals.
If Philips was slower to make an impact on the British market in the early 1950s, it soon made a reputation for artistic excellence and for the musicality and naturalness of its sonority. There was never any attempt to dazzle the collector with “spectacular” aural effects; the priority was a completely truthful aural perspective and a natural concert hall sound. Bernard Haitink recorded the Mahler symphonies in the days of analogue sound and again in digital but his version of the Third with the Concertgebouw Orchestra from 1966 always struck one as a fresh, dignified reading, one which is as persuasive as any in the catalogue.
Their account of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade with the Concertgebouw Orchestra under Kirill Kondrashin was recognised right from its appearance in 1980 as one of the most musically rewarding, even in a field that could boast landmark records by the likes of Beecham, Reiner and Karajan. The Concertgebouw’s leader, Hermann Krebbers’s characterisation of the story-spinning Scheherazade has rarely been equalled and much the same can be said of the crisp, sonorous and wonderfully sensitive playing of this great orchestra. Lionel Salter was at pains to praise “Kondrashin’s skill in pacing and shaping the movements as a whole, relating the diverse tempos and building up tension and dynamics by careful control so as to create climaxes of thrilling intensity and power”.
Although the mono LP era brought the first complete recording of Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé from Ansermet and Suisse Romande forces, both that and its stereo successor, were completely eclipsed by the 1959 account of the score from Pierre Monteux and the LSO with the Chorus of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. “There is only one word for this work, this performance, and this recording, and that is ravishing” wrote Deryck Cooke when the LP first appeared. Needless to say the reading has a special authority, for Monteux had conducted its premiere in 1912 and brought rare sympathy and understanding to this most magical of scores.
One of the early beneficiaries of stereo was opera. Culshaw and his colleagues developed what they called “Sonic Stage” which succeeded in conveying the movement of the singers on stage, as well as the rich orchestral detail. Birgit Nilsson’s Salome remains almost peerless. In reviewing its CD transfer twenty-three years after its first LP release, Alan Blyth wrote in the Gramophone that “it still beats most of its operatic competitors in terms of sound alone — an overwhelming account of Strauss’s sensual piece”. And it was not only the magisterial Nilsson who excited enthusiasm, the rest of the cast is magnificent and Solti was, of course, a Straussian to his fingertips — it remains the most thrilling version in the catalogue.
In addition to Nilsson, Decca possessed Dame Joan Sutherland who with Pavarotti, recorded a classic version of Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore with the Ambrosian Singers and the ECO under Richard Bonynge opens up all the traditional cuts to give an unusually full version. Again despite the passage of time and the appearance of a new Decca version with Gheorghiu and Alagna, this still remains rather special.
But perhaps one of the greatest achievements of Decca’s opera catalogue is the Janácek operas under Sir Charles Mackerras. Their award-winning set of Káta Kabanová from 1977, brought a moving interpretation of the title role by Elisabeth Söderström establishing, as John Warrack put it, “by an infinity of subtle touches and discreet, sensitive singing the picture of Káta as the richest and most human character in the drama” and an authoritative account of Janácek’s extraordinary score.
The piano may be one of the most difficult instruments to record but neither Decca nor Philips have ever been short of great pianists or having failed them on recording quality. The early Decca release sheets included Wilhelm Kempff before he migrated to DG, Wilhelm Backhaus and Clifford Curzon. Among present-day artists András Schiff has recorded a great deal of Bach for the Decca label and his Goldberg Variations has exceptional qualities: wit, fantasy and grace. The 1982 Kingsway Hall has a pretty well ideal clarity and warmth, too. Stephen Kovacevich’s 1969 record of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations is included in the series. This has clarity of thought, poise and above all depth, and is the most eloquent and thought-provoking set since Schnabel’s pioneering pre-war Beethoven Society album.
From the sublime to the enigmatic, Pascal Rogé’s Satie--playing deserves a special place in any collection. His coolly elegant poise is a joy, and his artistry does justice to the strange purity and childlike innocence and simplicity of these miniatures as well as their wit. Another piano recording that deserves the accolade of greatness is surely Debussy’s Études which Mitsuko Uchida recorded on Philips in the 1980s. The piano sound itself was (and still is) state-of-the-art and her virtuosity and artistry are pretty breathtaking. It was described as “bordering on the miraculous” when it first appeared, and its refinement of sonority and colour are an object-lesson in themselves.
From the late 1960s onwards, the Philips label built up a catalogue of chamber music that was virtually without equal. Among its greatest riches are the discs made by the Beaux Arts Trio. Although the two string players have changed, Menahem Pressler brings unrivalled delicacy and lightness of touch (not to mention effortless virtuosity) to all he does whether it be the Haydn or Mendelssohn Trios or Schubert’s masterpieces. The choice has fallen not on their scintillating and original performances from the 1960s but their digital set (with Isidore Cohen as violin in place of Daniel Guilet) from 1984, every bit as thoughtful and searching as their earlier readings.
Last but by no means least Arthur Grumiaux’s record of the Bach Sonatas and Partitas for violin alone made in the early 1960s. The purity of intonation is a joy in itself as is the musicality of his phrasing. The sound is completely natural — when Hilary Finch (of the London Times) wrote of the set on its reissue on CD, she said, “What dominates is the rhythmic rigour of Grumiaux’s playing. His perfectionism, fused with a real sense of struggle, brings sheer might to the fugues of the Sonatas: it is rather like watching a climber scaling a vast rock face, securing himself with a pick and leaping across the next crevasse.” Taken overall, these are aristocratic and serene readings of selfless artistry. |
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THE ORIGINALS 
