Piatigorsky in Barber and Hindemith

This is something of a belated birthday card for Samuel Barber, one of my favorite composers, whose 100th birthday was earlier this month.

To celebrate, we have one of his Barber's less often heard works. It is the lyrical cello sonata from 1932, in a performance by the great Gregor Piatigorsky. To go with it on this 1956 RCA LP, the cellist programmed the Hindemith sonata, which was written for him in 1948. Ralph Berkowitz accompanies.

This is a well played, well recorded LP of fine music, so I don't have much else to say about it (other than I wish Barber's music was played more often).

I do want to comment on the cover photo of Piatigorsky because it is so different from the usual covers for classical recordings of the time - and of our own time, for that matter. The progenitor of this kind of black-and-white, available light, mood photography is as much film noir as it is the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson. In classical music, its closest relative is probably Robert Hupka's photography of Arturo Toscanini (below left), which did so much to convey the conductor's magnetism.

The cigarette smoking is another cue - then and now conveying a self-possessed cool. The ever-present smoke and cocked eye of American news commentator Edward R. Murrow (above right) is an example. Television at that time was largely a grainy, black-and-white medium.

But the late-night, seen-it-all attitude was perhaps best suited to jazz musicians, and the Blue Note label made something of a specialty of the genre. Below are three examples - Hank Mobley 1 and 2, and Dexter Gordon, pulled from many, many such LP covers.


This is a style that the folks over at the highly amusing site called Crap Jazz Covers call "make me look intense and moody" - perhaps well suited to jazz musicians and incisive commentators, less so to a cello virtuoso from the Ukraine.

By the way, if you are more interested in Piatigorsky than in photos of smoking musicians, his autobiography, Cellist, is available in full online.