Not long ago I shared a 10-inch LP of Bizet's early symphony by Artur Rodzinski leading the New York Philharmonic. The progenitor of that recording was this 78-rpm set from circa 1945. The earlier album also included the prelude to Act III of Bizet's Carmen in a particularly lovely performance not on the LP.
The earlier set also had a different - and to my eyes far more attractive - Alex Steinweiss cover than did the 10-inch LP. The back of the cover (below) had a photo of Rodzinski not to be found on the LP. Finally the sound is better on the 78s, which are, of course, much less convenient than the LP. All this is strangely reminiscent of the trade-offs in the transition from LP to CD, as you may have noticed.
The download contains the Carmen Act III prelude and the two covers from the 78 set.
REMASTERED VERSION - JANUARY 2015
9 comments:
Hello again Buster: I'm going to download all of these. I like all the Rodzinski LPs I have, and I adore the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto he did with the immensely talented Erica Morini. His competition on the Bizet in my collection is the Beecham recording (and Beecham is at the very pinnacle of my musical pantheon), so it will be interesting to hear. The Prokofiev I have, in a terrible copy, but I like the performance a lot.
As for Rodzinski's personal oddities: It's said that he conducted with a pistol in his tux. Don't know if it's true, but "they" say it of him.
Hi Larry - I enjoy the Beecham as well. He's a conductor I used to collect. I have been touting Rodzinski because he was very talented and is somewhat forgotten.
I have just been in hospital for shoulder surgery, accompanied by my Big 10-inch Record downloads and Mrs. Rodzinski's "Our Two Lives" (recommended by you). All went very well indeed and I am indebted, once again to your generosity and knowledge. Thank you.
@ robert,
That's wonderful to hear. So glad about the shoulder - now you can conduct along with Rodzinski! (Careful you don't dislodge your gun on the downbeat.) Thanks for writing!
Remastered version (Apple lossless):
https://mega.co.nz/#!iYVGQJjT!0RLfdB9yhRgnHJmyhDQwagrNKsR5MJtvb3wMEBZp_KA
I don't believe one can find Rodzinsky's delectable performance with the Philharmoni-Symphony Orchestra of NY of the Wolf-Ferrari Secret of Susanne Overture here on this blog; indeed it's not currently available ANYWHERE to my knowledge. So, here is a transfer I obtained years ago, from a Columbia historic sampler Lp from 1967 entitled "A Festival of Famous Conductors", BM-13. I did not make this transfer as I no longer have the disk; but I found this on a Russian blog some years ago; it does not sound quite as good as my recollections of playing my own copy of the LP, so if a better one turns up, be advised that this is certainly somewhat degraded, being a little bit dimmer and very slightly more distorted than ideal.
https://www27.zippyshare.com/d/ENQJNIgC/25196/Wolf-Ferrari%20Secret%20of%20Suzanne%20Overture%20-%20PSNY%2c%20Rodzinski%20%5b1945%5d.mp3
--or--
https://www27.zippyshare.com/v/ENQJNIgC/file.html
(2 MB mp3 mono file, cover image of LP embedded; available ONLY for 30 days as of upload on 9/21/18.)
8H Haggis
A super-rare Rodzinski recording: in the late 1930s and early 40s, a US outfit called "The World's Greatest Music" hired major American conductors, such as Eugene Ormandy, Erich Leinsdorf, Fritz Reiner, and Artur Rodzinski, to produce budget 78-rpm records with very fine orchestras, which were not identified due to their contractual obligations with Columbia or Victor.
More information, some cover images, and photos of the disks, may be found in this forum discussion:
http://forum.talkingmachine.info/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=28577
I doubt that this pre-war "grocery store" cheapie record project was done by the same people who created a similar series in the 1950s, many of which featured old Concert Hall LPs by Swarowsky; see the ReDiscovery website for more information and several transfers. (My own introduction to quite a few standard rep works came from those $1 boxes; very few classical LPs were for sale in the stores of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, during my childhood and youth--but those were plentiful!)
At least 12 to 15 years ago, I found a Japanese amateur 78 enthusiast's now-defunct website that provided some of these items in personal transfers from 78 sets that had somehow made their way to Japan. One that I saved (in Real Audio format!) was a performance of the Franck D-Minor Symphony, actually by the then-new NBC Symphony under its original orchestra "trainer", Artur Rodzinski, recorded in 1938 in Carnegie Hall (not NBC's claustrophobic Studio 8H.) So the sound is spacious, though the record is typically gritty and somewhat indistinct, being pre-high-fidelity. I have found a sample scan of the label on one of the original 78 sides on the Net, and have embedded it in the file containing the complete symphony.
I made a small effort to do a few improvements when ripping the old CDR I had saved to FLAC mono format, but not enough NR to seriously degrade a recording that had ALREADY been compromised by the old Real Audio encoding (a primitive audio format NOBODY uses any more, encoded, I recall, at about 128 kbs.) I did have to remove a turntable rumbling plus a hum signature, centered somewhere around 100 Hz, and to tame some of the very tiresome shellac surface hiss. The original download had absolutely NO fundamental musical bass--only noise--and also a residual amount of IM distortion; so no doubt a new modern transfer from these same records, done PROPERLY, would have vastly more ingratiating sound. Surprisingly, the musical dynamic range has NOT been compressed by heavy audio limiting (as many Victor 78s by the NBC Symphony were); one suspects that RCA had *nothing* to do with this recording!
The performance is not hugely different from the mid-fifties mono recording by Rodzinski that was made in Vienna by Westminster; but there ARE subtle differences. In just the very opening of the finale, the NBC Symphony performance is VERY strict and precise; but the Vienna State Opera version has more inflection and agogic. The later performance is therefore more *mannered* (not that this is really a bad thing.)
{67 MB, FLAC, plus label image. LIMITED TIME AVAILABILITY, and may be deleted by ZS around a month after its 11/8/18 upload; but you might not see that happen with reliability.}
https://www87.zippyshare.com/d/tqm7wSxK/2834/Franck_Sym-in-dr_NBC_Rodzinski_1938_WorldsGreatestMusicSR33-38.flac
-or-
https://www87.zippyshare.com/v/tqm7wSxK/file.html
BTW: an extremely rare 1941 Columbia 78 set of Rodzinski conducting the Cleveland Orchestra in Beethoven's Symphony No. 1 has been transferred by Bryan of the Shellackophile blog; his 2012 page of info and currently functional download links is found here:
http://shellackophile.blogspot.com/2012/12/beethoven-first-symphony-rodzinski.html
8H Haggis
More Rodzinski - Live Performances, 29 November 1944
Here is an old deleted AS-Disc CD that was once uploaded on a blog that is now defunct, featuring Artur Rodzinski conducting the Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of New York in the main contents of the live broadcast performance of 29 Nov. 1944: the Bizet Symphony in C (subtly different from the Columbia record set, taken down on 15 January 1945, with slower tempi in parts); and a wonderful rendering of the Saint-Saens Piano Concerto No. 4 in C-Minor, Op. 44, with Rodzinski's Polish contryman, Artur Rubinstein. The sound is really quite decent!
{41 MB, mp3s: LIMITED AVAILABILITY - as ZS will not guarantee its presence after 12/12/18, depending on any possible continued requests for DL.}
https://www77.zippyshare.com/d/Io81ASVD/32402/Bizet%20Sym%20in%20C%3b%20Saint-Saens%20PC%204%2c%20Rubinstein%3b%20Rozinski%20-%2029%20Nov%201944.zip
-or-
https://www77.zippyshare.com/v/Io81ASVD/file.html
8H Haggis
FYI - the commercial recordings of both the Franck and Bizet symphonies have appeared on this blog.
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