More Mozart from Shumsky, Plus the Haffner Symphony with Wallenstein

Following up on my recent post of violinist Oscar Shumsky in Mozart sonatas, here is his circa 1956 reading of the Violin Concerto No. 5 in A major, K. 219. It is coupled with a fleet performance of the Symphony No. 35 in D major, K. 385, from Alfred Wallenstein and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

The LA forces play strikingly well under the baton of Wallenstein, who was completing his 13 years as LAPO maestro when this record was issued in 1956. Shumsky is backed by the New York-based Little Orchestra, which does not display the same discipline as the West Coast musicians. Thomas Scherman is the conductor in the concerto.

Oscar Shumsky

As always, Shumsky is perfectly in control - perhaps even a little too much so in the finale's quasi-Turkish music, which benefits from some abandon. The sound is good throughout.

These recordings come to us from Music-Appreciation Records, which had been started a few years previously as a mail-order subscription effort by the Book-of-the-Month Club. As with the similar efforts before and later, the pitch was getting cultured. In one widely-placed ad, publisher and TV personality Bennett Cerf exclaimed, "In a few minutes Music-Appreciation Records taught me more about Beethoven's Fifth Symphony than I learned in a month in a course in college!"

Many of the Music-Appreciation records contained both a performance of the work and an audio analysis; sometimes they came on separate discs. My own collection has both orphaned performances and analyses with no performance. This particular record did not have an recorded analysis; at least I don't have it. There are notes on the back cover by Deems Taylor, but of course this is not any different from most classical recordings then and now.

Wallenstein himself appears in some of the Music-Appreciation ads, providing a not-entirely-disinterested rave (see below).