Vaughan Williams' 'The Pilgrim's Progress'

Here from the original HMV pressings is Ralph Vaughan Williams' adaptation of John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, an important setting that is nonetheless neglected. This 1970-71 production was the first recording of just two to date.

The work is certainly an opera, although the composer did not call it that, yet it may be unlike any other example of that genre because of its source material.

Based on a 1684 portrait of John Bunyan by Thomas Sadler

Bunyan was a 17th century nonconformist preacher. The full title and subtitle of his book explains its premise: "The Pilgrim's Progress from This World, to That Which Is to Come. Wherein is Discovered the Manner of His Setting Out, His Dangerous Journey and Safe Arrival at the Desired Countrey."

It is one of the most significant and influential works of the English language, although hardly fashionable in the mid-20th century, when it had its unsuccessful premiere at Covent Garden. This recording's producer, Christopher Bishop, explained, "An opera house audience has certain preconceptions about opera (or had in 1951), and Pilgrim certainly does not fit them. There is really no dramatic conflict. Pilgrim has the unfair advantage of having God on his side, and one knows that he will reach the Celestial City from the rise of the curtain. There is no heroine, and there are no set arias to applaud."

His summary: "I think The Pilgrim's Progress is a marvellous work. It has been called undramatic, and is not easy to stage effectively, but all its difficulties are worth overcoming for the sake of its magnificent music and its spirituality."

John Noble as the Pilgrim

The composer labored over the work on and off for thirty years. At one point, despairing of ever having it staged, he reused some of the music he had sketched for the opera in his luminous Symphony No. 5. Thus when it finally was mounted at Covent Garden, its failure was a blow, but a new staging at Cambridge in 1953 was a triumph. Those performances had cast the undergraduate John Noble as the Pilgrim. He became identified with the part and repeats his role in this recording.

Here let me call in Christopher Bishop for a precis of the story:

The opera opens with Bunyan alone on the stage, while the brass of the orchestra play the great Puritan hymn York. Bunyan is seen writing his book, and all that follows is the dream which inspired him to write it.

Vanity Fair

Pilgrim enters with his burden, and meets the Evangelist who directs him on the path to Life Everlasting. He is prepared ceremonially for his journey, and then he sets out along the King's Highway. He meets with the trials of the Valley of Humiliation, where he fights and overcomes Apollyon, then he visits Vanity Fair, and is thrown into Prison, after declaring "I buy the Truth". 

The Meeting with Appolyon

He is released from Prison by the Key of Promise and goes on his way to the Delectable Mountains, meeting on his way Mr and Mrs By-ends, who provide a moment of humour. He leaves them to go on his way to the Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains, who prepare him to cross the River of Death. Then "the trumpets sound for him on the other side", and the chorus sing Alleluias to welcome him to the Celestial City.

The choir fades, and Bunyan returns and holds his book out as an offering to the audience.

Vaughan Williams' version is much compressed from the approximately 400-page book. The Pilgrim (actually, Bunyan called him "Christian") visited 21 locales on his journey, the names of which are still used even today: the Slough of Despond, House Beautiful, Valley of the Shadow of Death, Vanity Fair and the Celestial City.

The composer's identification with the work is well captured by the critic Edward Greenfield:

Vaughan Williams, I have kept remembering during my listening, was a life-long agnostic, deeply sympathetic to the church but not in fact himself a conventional believer. Yet he was devoted to Bunyan's great work and its spiritual message, relentlessly pursuing his vision of turning it into music over half a lifetime. He insisted that the hero in his opera should lose his first name "Christian" and remain simply "Pilgrim", not just to bring the message home to as wide an audience as possible, but so that he himself could identify the more closely. It is obvious in almost every bar of this glowing performance how strongly he felt each situation from the heart. Here we have Vaughan Williams, the greathearted agnostic, finding his own spiritual salvation through personal individual struggle, drawing from his own musical achievement not just in experience but in specific quotation.

It remains to be said that this is a definitive performance, beautifully performed and recorded. Greenfield wrote, "As to the music itself, the records demonstrate very clearly the meatiness of inspiration, no thin passages here. For the listener already impregnated with love of the Vaughan Williams idiom these five sides will, I predict, draw regular gasps of delight, as one gorgeous passage succeeds another."

The performers include a long list of the best British singers of the time, including Raimund Herincx, John Carol Case, Norma Burrowes, Alfreda Hodgson, Ian Partridge, John Shirley-Quirk and Sheila Armstrong. Sir Adrian led the London Philharmonic Choir and Orchestra in the Kingsway Hall recording.

Sir Adrian Boult

As a fill-up on the sixth side, the set includes rehearsal extracts with Boult. Christopher Bishop explained, "I have always wanted to produce a record of Sir Adrian in rehearsal, but he normally says so little during rehearsals (preferring to use his eyes and baton to indicate his wishes), that up to now there has not been enough material. However, with a full length opera, and with a chorus present I felt we would have enough to make up a side. Christopher Parker, the balance engineer, hid a microphone by Sir Adrian's desk, so that we could catch clearly what he said, and ran a tape from that microphone during the rehearsals before each 'take'."

The recording session in Kingsway Hall

Edward Greenfield observed, "Whether fairly or not, these present Boult as a far sharper-tongued, no-nonsense figure than the general public will ever have realised." I will add that the sessions were with a large orchestra and a far-off choir and soloists in a huge hall, so Sir Adrian perforce had to shout to be heard and understood.

The download includes complete scans, including the original 16-page booklet with libretto, the Greenfield review and Bishop's article on the production.

LINK

Ad in The Gramophone, February 1972

Dolly

So much has been written about the life, career and legacy of the great Dolly Parton that anything I post here would approach the superfluous. But let me say a few words and post a few songs anyway, as a brief remembrance.

For those who do not know her songs and singing, the photo above may be misleading. Dolly was known for her wildly artificial look. But if you examine the photograph closely, you will also find evidence of her great sincerity; her ability to perform simple songs with simple messages in such a way that they transcended artifice to reach the very core of the listener.

Today we have one of her best and most famous albums, 1973's Jolene, which begins with its deservedly famous title song where she begs a beautiful rival to stay away from her man. The other side leads off with a second astonishing (and famed) composition, I Will Always Love You, supposedly written in farewell to her singing partner, Porter Wagoner, whose act she had joined at age 21. This heavily gospel influenced number was later to become a mega-hit for the remarkable Whitney Houston, herself from a gospel background.

Gospel - along with true folk music - was the root of Dolly's career. She learned music from her parents and relatives in rural Tennessee. The talent and endless drive was hers alone. Allied to a big heart, and a welcoming and accepting nature, she became a legend, and rightfully so.

In addition to the LP, I have added another of Parton's greatest songs, and my personal favorite, the hugely affecting and deeply meaningful Coat of Many Colors from 1971, which somehow captures both her hardscrabble background and her great humanity. May she rest in peace.

LINK

Ileana Cotrubas with Marriner in Mozart

This post is a memorial tribute to the Romanian soprano Ileana Cotrubas, who had died at 87. She was a huge opera star for about 15 years before developing vocal problems and retiring in 1989.

Cotrubas was known both for her affecting performances and for her uncompromising views, leading the adulation from critics and audiences and occasional conflicts with directors and conductors who did not meet her standards.

Her obituary in the New York Times (gift link) quotes the critic Alan Blyth saying that she had the power "to make the audience’s heart beat just that much faster as soon as she appears onstage, and to convince it that for the moment nothing in the world matters more to her than to convey the particular predicament of whichever character she is portraying."

Today we will hear her not in opera but in sacred music by Mozart, via what may be her first recording, that of the Coronation Mass, K 317, of 1779, and the  Litaniae Lauretanae, K 195, of 1774. Neville Marriner conducts the Schola Cantorum of Oxford and the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, with contralto Helen Watts, tenor Robert Tear and baritone John Shirley-Quirk. The recording is from May 1971, several years before Contrubas' most celebrated opera recordings. It was, however, not her sole venture into sacred music: she also recorded Mozart's Mass in C minor and Requiem, and perhaps other works.

This recording - and in particular the soprano - impressed critic Trevor Harvey of The Gramophone: "I can whole-heartedly recommend the present disc, and not least for the contribution of Ileana Cotrubas. Her singing is simply gorgeous. The others of the solo quartet need no commendation from me by now, for you have only to look at the names. Marriner conducts the Mass with first-rate rhythm and gets great intensity of singing in 'Crucifixus'. Ileana Cotrubus is really marvellous, with her quality and firmness of line."

John Shirley-Quirk, Helen Watts, Robert Tear

The Coronation Mass is, as you might have guessed, associated with royalty. The first record of it being performed was at the coronation of Francis II as Holy Roman Emperor in 1792; and it soon became a favorite for use at important ceremonies at court in Vienna. (The sleeve commentary states that it was associated with the miraculous crowing of an image of the Virgin in 1744; this is now thought not to be the case.)

Mozart composed two settings of the Litaniae Lauretanae, the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This is the second. "Lauretanae" refers to Loreto. This is a reference to Mary's and the Holy Family's home in Nazareth, which medieval tradition has the angels removing to Dalmatia and then to Loreto, Italy in the 13th century, to escape wartime destruction. The Litany was written for Salzburg Cathedral.

Neville Marriner

While Trevor Harvey singled out Cotrubas in his review, all the soloists are excellent, as is the vintage ASMF under the estimable Marriner. The chorus master was Andrew Parrott, at the time the conductor of the Schola Cantorum. George Malcolm provided the organ continuo.

The fine recording was made in St. John's, Smith Square, London.

LINK

Ad in The Gramophone, September 1972

Ray Anthony Causes a Rumpus on Campus

I wanted to post a Ray Anthony record, and I will admit that I chose this one for its fun and very much of its time cover.

Also, it goes very well with a previous Anthony upload called Houseparty Hop, which took place at a rather more rumbustious fraternity house (see below).

The older LP has been newly remastered for this occasion. You can find it and my musings about the cover goings-on in this post from 2017.

Houseparty Hop was a 10-inch LP with recordings from 1951. Campus Rumpus started out as a 10-incher in 1952, but today's version is the 12-inch variety from a few years later.

Younger readers may be wondering what a "rumpus" was or is. Well, actually I gave a clue a few paragraphs above by using the related archaic term "rumbustious," which means pretty much what it sounds like. "Ruckus" is somewhat similar - noise and celebration.

That's what you will find if you examine the LP cover at top. An enormous fraternity house - Alpha Omega Phi (presumably a slightly reordered Alpha Phi Omega) - is holding a dance, with the clarinetist wailing away above the crowd. (You would think it would have been a trumpeter in honor of Ray Anthony.) Joe College can't wait - in his rush he is just about yanking Betty Co-ed's arm out of its socket.

Joe is dressed in his best Ivy League attire - a camel hair blazer, bow tie, argyle socks and saddle shoes, all of which are wildly out of style today but were still in vogue when I was a young fellow in the 60s. (Well, maybe not the bow tie.)

On the second floor, while the left hand room appears to house two drinkers, the right hand window shows the only person who is actually doing what college is for - studying. This was true to life then and probably is today, with the possible exception of the studying.

BMOC

Well, Buster, what about the music, I hear someone asking. It's very much in the vein of other such records. Anthony's band was less R&B than Ralph Marterie's and not as jazz oriented as Les Brown and especially Sauter-Finegan. Ray had a straightforward, chrome-plated dance band.

The songs are a combination of standards and semi-standards with originals by Anthony and George (the Fox) Williams, who was Ray's arranger at the time. (George has been featured here a few times under his own name - The Fox in Hi-Fi, with a cover that has to be seen to be believed, and Rhythm Was His Business, which actually has another outrageous cover. Both are newly remastered and well worth hearing.)

George Williams

The standards on the Anthony record include "The Continental" (Con Conrad and Herb Magidson), "They Didn't Believe Me" (Jerome Kern), "Walkin' My Baby Back Home" (Roy Turk and Fred Ahlert), "Deep Night" (Charlie Henderson), "True Blue Lou" (Leo Robin-Sam Coslow-Richard Whiting), "It's De-Lovely" (Cole Porter) and "Dancing in the Dark" (Dietz and Schwartz).

A special mention of Gene Gifford's "Smoke Rings," which he wrote for Glen Gray and the Casa Loma Orchestra, and which became that band's theme. An extensive post is coming up on the Casa Lomas, assuming I ever get it written.

Now that the music's out of the way, let me provide my deconstruction of the back cover.

On this side, Joe and Betty have disembarked from a hot road/jalopy whose wheels have serious camber issues. The vehicle appears to be a 1932 Ford minus bumpers and fenders, and with a fox tail on the radio antenna. (I don't think this vulpine affectation was a thing in the 50s; rather the 20s, if then.) Everyone else seems to have the same Model A, although some examples have fenders. In the 60s, in contrast, the fashion was not for old beaters but for small sports cars - MGs and Triumphs. No one wore bow ties - but then they didn't in the 50s either.

LINK

Victor de Sabata

The intensity you see in the photo of Victor de Sabata above is what you hear in his recordings.

De Sabata (1892-1967) was a hugely gifted conductor, but circumstances denied him lasting fame - at least in the U.S.

It was his misfortune to be a countryman and contemporary of perhaps the most renowned conductor of the day, Arturo Toscanini. Unlike the anti-Fascist Toscanini, he was a friend of Mussolini. Also, his primary position for much of his career was at the head of La Scala rather than as conductor of a symphony orchestra. His best known recording is certainly the La Scala production of Tosca with Maria Callas, from 1953. He suffered a severe heart attack soon thereafter and quit conducting.

De Sabata's recordings reveal a maestro of remarkable gifts, inspiring orchestras to produce music of passion and color - his podium appearance being famously described as being "a cross between Julius Caesar and Satan."

The Trevi fountain

Today's recordings begin with a set by the Santa Cecilia Orchestra of Rome, which de Sabata had first conducted early in his career. These were made in 1947 and 1948. 

We start with one of the great orchestral showpieces, Respighi's Fountains of Rome. I suppose this could be considered impressionist music, but the way it is played here, it is startlingly realistic. The violin geyser effect would be one that de Sabata would invoke in other contexts.

Vaslav Nijinski in Jeux

For many years, Debussy's Jeux was not considered among his best works, but today that has changed. Composed for the Ballets Russes in 1913, it had to wait until 1947 for its first recording, which this is. The work's constantly changing moods and colors are made for de Sabata's gifts.

As mentioned, de Sabata was a famed opera conductor. The program includes several examples of his work, limited in these instances to overtures and preludes.

We start with the dramatic prelude to Verdi's I vespri Siciliani. Notice how the conductor builds intensity throughout the opening even though the music itself is choppy. This is followed by the preludes to Act I and Act III of La traviata.

The secret revealed: Mario Sammarco and Lydia Lipkowska
in Il segreto di Susanna

Next we have the overture to Ernanno Wolf-Ferrari's most famous work, Il segreto di Susanna, a comic opera from 1909. Or perhaps it's just the delightful overture that's famous. This is followed by an intermezzo from the same composer's Il quatrro rusteghi.

The balance of today's program is primarily from 1939 sessions with the Berlin Philharmonic. First is another recording premiere, Kodály's Dances of Galánta, written just six years before. This folk-based work was perhaps a surprising choice for de Sabata. He does it well, without quite the panache that he displayed in the Respighi, perhaps.

Finally, orchestral excerpts from Wagner: first, an passionate reading of the Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde. De Sabata conducted at Bayreuth that year.

To complete the program, I've added de Sabata's remarkably dynamic 1946 recording of the Ride of the Valkyries from Die Walküre. This is with the London Philharmonic.

LINK

Teddi King on Storyville

Today's post gathers all of Teddi King's recordings for the US Storyville label, made from 1953-55, before she signed with RCA Victor.

These blogs have already chronicled some of her career:

• Her 1952 dates with George Shearing, along with a few of her earliest recordings with Nat Pierce's band

• Her 1954 Brunswick EP, which recently appeared on my other blog

• The RCA Victor singles from 1956-58

• A complete set of her 1958 Out of the Blue recordings

Today we have the three Storyville LPs - the 10-inchers 'Round Midnight and Storyville Presents Miss Teddi King, and the 12-inch Now in Vogue.

'Round Midnight

For her first Storyville LP, circa 1953, the label paired her with pianist Beryl Booker, who otherwise did not record for that company, to my knowledge. King and Booker had been performing at the Storyville club in Boston, and the record was made there.

The record's notes set the scene: "After the club closed one night, the engineer set up his equipment while Teddi and Beryl ran over the songs. No arrangements were used, of course. Never have two artists cooperated so graciously. The songs with which Beryl was unfamiliar brought Teddi to the piano to play through the chords - just once, for Beryl Booker has a fantastic ear. In the songs Teddi had never done before like 'Prelude To A Kiss,' Beryl supported her closely." In other words, no prior rehearsal of unfamiliar material.

Beryl Booker

The results are mixed. Booker can sound tentative. Added to this is the poor sounding piano (at least as recorded). I've done my best to improve its sound.

The singing is however, for the most part quite fine. The program begins with the seldom-heard vocal version of Thelonious Monk's "'Round Midnight." (The genesis and various permutations of this song are explored in this post on my other blog.)

Cole Porter's "I Concentrate on You" is followed by two Rodgers and Hart standards, "Little Girl Blue" and "It Never Entered My Mind," all done well, if at funereal tempos.

"What's New" started off as a Bob Haggart instrumental called "I'm Free." It was published under its second name in 1939 after Johnny Burke added lyrics. The song became hugely popular with jazz artists and vocalists in the early 1950s.

Teddi seems to have revived the vocal version of Duke Ellington's "Prelude to a Kiss." It had been first recorded by Mary McHugh with Johnny Hodges in 1939. The lyrics are by Irving Gordon. This is beautifully done.

In summary, a good album, but it could have been better. The cover is an apparent portrait of Teddi's blood vessels.

LINK to 'Round Midnight

Storyville Presents Miss Teddi King

The second Storyville LP features a spry quintet including Ruby Braff (trumpet), Jimmy Jones (piano) Milt Hinton (bass) and Jo Jones (drums). Jones was a talented vocal accompanist and Braff offered helpful obbligatos, supported by a famed bass-drums duo. The songs are an interesting mix of unusual items and standards, although again mainly at slow tempos.

"I Saw Stars" is a delightful item by Al Goodhart, Al Hoffman and Maurice Sigler, recorded by several bands in 1934 and then forgotten until this outing. This is the first up-tempo number we've come across.

Ruby Braff

The arranger Johnny Richards wrote the most interesting "Love Is a Now and Then Thing," which Teddi does well. 

"New Orleans" is one of Hoagy Carmichael's most ingratiating songs, more for the melody than the longing-for-the-South lyrics. Interestingly, this was first recorded in 1932 by the Bennie Moten band with Jimmy Rushing singing.

A very early Jerry Livingston song is next - 1933's "It's the Talk of the Town," first recorded by Glen Gray and the Casa Loma Orchestra with a Kenny Sargent vocal. The words are by Al J. Neiburg and Marty Symes.

"I Guess I'll Have to Change My Plan" was introduced by none other than Clifton Webb in the 1929 revue The Little Show. Webb had requested an additional number during rehearsals, so Arthur Schwartz recycled the melody of an old song called "I Love to Lie Awake in Bed" to new lyrics by Howard Dietz.

Jimmy Jones

The 1947 pop song "It's All in the Mind" was written by the then-hot duo of Allan Roberts and Doris Fisher. They composed the piece for the musical Cigarette Girl.

The Gershwins wrote "Our Love Is Here to Stay" (as "Love Is Here to Stay") for the 1937 musical Goldwyn Follies. Kenny Baker was the troubadour. 

The album concludes with "Spring Won't Be Around This Season," a little-known song by Duncan Mullins.

Burt Goldblatt's cover image is a precursor of Xerox art.

LINK to Storyville Presents Miss Teddi King

Now in Vogue

For 1955's Now in Vogue, Storyville surrounded King with another talented jazz group, encompassing Nick Travis (trumpet), Bob Brookmeyer (valve trombone), Gene Quill (alto sax), Sol Schlinger (baritone sax), Billy Taylor (piano), Milt Hinton (bass) and Osie Johnson (drums). Travis and the saxophonists appear on only four of the 12 songs on this 12-inch LP. It's an excellent record with many unusual songs.

The set starts off with an unfamiliar Rodgers and Hart composition, "Why Do You Suppose?", written for 1929's Heads Up!

Then we have the very familiar "Over the Rainbow," composed by Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg for 1939's The Wizard of Oz.

Harry Warren and Mack Gordon wrote the very fine "This Is Always" for the 1946 film Three Little Girls in Blue. Dropped from the final product, it was nonetheless widely recorded at the time and is better remembered than the musical it came from (or didn't come from).

Bob Brookmeyer

"Fools Fall in Love" is a very welcome Irving Berlin song from 1940. It is from the score of Broadway's Louisiana Purchase, where the vocalists were William Gaxton and Vera Zorina. The tune made it into the 1941 film version, but only as an instrumental.

Duke Ellington's "I Didn't Know About You" from 1944 is one of his most recognizable songs, with lyrics by Bob Russell. Many singers recorded it at the time, including Joya Sherrill with the Duke's band.

James F. Hanley and Joseph McCarthy composed "I'm in the Market for You" for the 1930 film High Society Blues with Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell.

Frances Langford introduced "You Hit the Spot" in the 1936 film Collegiate. The authors were the prolific Mack Gordon and Harry Revel.

Billy Taylor

Another fine Ellington song is "(I Want) Something to Live For," which he wrote with Billy Strayhorn in 1939 and recorded that year with Jean Eldridge.

I was surprised to learn that Louis Armstrong was the first to record "You Can Count on Me," a 1931 song by Charles Carpenter, Earl Hines and Louis Dunlap.

"Old Folks" is deservedly one of Willard Robison's most famous songs; the author of the evocative lyrics was Dedette Lee Hill. The song is from 1938. You will find Robison's own recording here. Truthfully, Teddi and the group are a little urbane for this one.

Conversely, they are superior in the wrenching Rodgers and Hart classic, "A Ship without a Sail," another song from Heads Up! This version is notable for including a seldom-heard verse.

"You Turned the Tables on Me" also includes its verse, unusually. It's a wonderful song, perhaps the most familiar by Louis Alter other than "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans." Alter composed it with lyricist Sidney Mitchell for Alice Faye to present in the 1936 film Sing Baby, Sing.

King is as usual throughout these records - her lovely voice in tune, and singing with impeccable diction and timing, and a great deal of involvement. Honestly, although the backings were by well-known jazz artists, they seem routine at times. Even so, this is material to treasure.

The sound on the second and third LPs is better than the first.

LINK to Now in Vogue

Efrem Kurtz at the NY Philharmonic

The conductor Efrem Kurtz had a productive relationship with the New York Philharmonic throughout the 1940s, leading pops concerts at Lewisohn Stadium and recording principally light material with the ensemble.

Today we have two LPs worth of the studio results - enjoyable readings of Kabalevsky's The Comedians and of the ballet suite Mlle. Angot, based on a Lecocq opera, plus a new transfer of the ballet suite Les Sylphides from Chopin's music along with Villa-Lobos' tone poem Uirapurú. (The latter album appeared here several years ago.)

Kabalevsky's The Comedians

The Russian composer Dmitry Kabalevsky (1904-87) produced nothing more popular than his orchestral suite The Comedians, which was adapted from incidental music for the children's play The Inventor and the Buffoons by Mark Daniel. That work somehow involved Johannes Gutenberg.

It's helpful to remember that context, for the score is often castigated for being simplistic.Here, for example, is The Gramophone's verdict:

[I]t is bright, extrovert, rather crude music, with plenty of obvious rhythmic foundation ... I can only shake my head sadly at the results of making composers write according to the presumed taste of the masses. From his other works we know Kabalevsky to be a highly talented composer, with something worthwhile to say and an attractive way of saying it; this Suite, for all its superficial attraction, does nothing more than tickle the ears of the groundlings.

The writer did allow that it isn't as vulgar as Khatchaturian's Gayane - if you want to see for yourself, Kurtz also recorded that suite, and it has appeared here along with renditions from Fabien Sevitzky, Nikolai Golovanov and Artur Rodziński. There's also a separate post where Gayane's "Sabre Dance" is taken on by everyone from the Andrews Sisters to Mickey Katz.

Dmitry Kabalevsky

Kabalevsky himself had a similar "hit" in the "Galop" from The Comedians. This first entered my consciousness as a youngster watching the Ed Sullivan variety show on television. Ed had a penchant for jugglers and similar vaudeville acts, who would often be accompanied by the Galop. It also was used as theme music by some programs.

Lecocq - Mlle. Angot Suite

Charles Lecocq

The Comedians recording dates from 1947; the same recording date in Carnegie Hall produced a ballet suite called Mlle. Angot, taken from music from an comic opera by the 19th century French composer Charles Lecocq (1832-1918).

Lecocq is little remembered this days, but back then he was a composer who rivalled Jacques Offenbach in popularity. His La Fille de Madame Angot was quite a success after its 1872 debut. In the early 1940s, Léonide Massine decided to base a ballet on the piece. Mlle. Angot premiered in New York in 1943, with the music chosen by Kurtz and arranged by Richard Mohaupt. A suite from that music is what is on this LP.

Margot Fonteyn as Mam'zelle Angot in the 1947 production

Massine decided to redo the ballet for a 1947 production in London. That version was called Mam'zelle Angot and had new arrangements by Gordon Jacob. (That second version is available on the blog in a 1956 recording led by Robert Irving. There, it is coupled with music from Glazunov that Irving arranged for the ballet Birthday Offering. This good early stereo disc is newly remastered.)

LINK to The Comedians and Mlle. Angot

Chopin - Les Sylphides

Frédéric Chopin wrote very little orchestral music, confining himself to a handful of concerted works for piano in his relative youth. Since then, we have had 200 years of critics deriding his orchestrations. I for one love those works and much prefer them to latter-day orchestrations of his piano works - which of course is what we have here with the ballet score for Les Sylphides.

The ballet was the inspiration of Michel Fokine, who himself had been inspired by Alexander Glazunov's orchestral suite Chopiniana, based on Chopin's piano works. A ballet with that title appeared in 1909. For his ballet, Fokine convinced Glazunov to add a Waltz to his selections; the choreographer then decided to include more numbers that were orchestrated by Maurice Keller.

From the first London performance, 1911

In 1909, Diaghilev produced a new version called Les Sylphides in Paris, throwing out all the 1907 charts with the exception of Glazunov's waltz arrangement, adding new arrangements by Anatoly Lyadov, Sergei Taneyev, Nikolai Tcherepnin and Igor Stravinsky.

Alexander Gretchaninov

These reshufflings set off a fashion for reorchestrating the various dances, and versions by Maurice Ravel, Benjamin Britten, Roy Douglas, Gordon Jacob, and Leroy Anderson/Peter Bodge have had their day. Kurtz' version has arrangements by the Russian-born American émigré Alexander Gretchaninov. Those seem to have been written specifically for this recording, although that is nowhere mentioned on the record.

The New Records liked this Kurtz LP: "A really fine recording with modern reproduction of Les Sylphides is a welcome item, and should enjoy a healthy sale... The ballet is an enchanting bit of romantic fluff danced to some of Chopin's most familiar music, lushly orchestrated."

Villa-Lobos - Uirapurú

Heitor Villa-Lobos

If you search long and hard on the Les Sylphides cover above, you will see that the LP also includes the tone poem Uirapurú by the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos. It was recorded on the same day in 1949 as the Chopin ballet. Kurtz must have thought intensively about what music would be least likely to be companionable with the Chopin. He apparently dismissed the idea of Ives or Varèse and hit upon the notion of switching locales from the Parisian salons to the Brazilian jungles.

An uirapurú - the "king of love"?

I much enjoy Uirapurú - it's like early Stravinsky in Brazil. But let me give you the overheated view of The New Records:

Uirapurú, composed in 1917, tells the story of the legendary enchanted bird, Uirapurú, whom the Indians of Brazil considered the "King of Love." A beautiful Indian maiden shoots him through the heart with a bow and arrow, transforming him into a handsome youth. Later an ugly old Indian, playing a nose flute, who had previously been beaten by the natives, returns and shoots the youth, who turns again into the beautiful bird which flies away singing its haunting song. This symphonic poem employs a number of native percussion instruments. It marvelously recreates the feeling of a magical Brazilian jungle with its bizarre colors, its impenetrable mystery and its savage poetry.

In other words, this was considered to be prime exotica 75 years ago - "bizarre," "impenetrable" and "savage." Leaving this nonsense aside, it is hugely enjoyable and I recommend it to you as an elixir after the weak tea of Chopin orchestrations.

LINK to Les Sylphides and Uirapurú