As that was transpiring, I ran across an Andre Kostelanetz LP in my collection with his take on the Mississippi Suite. This 10-inch album couples the 1946 recording of the Grofé work with Kosty's 1942 rendition of Jerome Kern's Mark Twain (Portrait for Orchestra). Both suites are notable contributions to the then-popular vein of musical Americana.
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| Ferde Grofé |
The Mississippi Suite dates from 1925, and was the Grofé's first attempt at such an extended composition. Whiteman recorded his version in 1927, minus the first movement. Grofé later arranged the piece for a larger ensemble. This may be the first recording of that version, although I would not swear that Kostelanetz used the composer's own score. It is possible the conductor edited or even rearranged it.
The fourth section of the Mississippi Suite ("Mardi Gras") spawned a popular song in 1942 called "Daybreak," with lyrics by Harold Adamson. Tommy Dorsey had a hit with the tune, with a vocal by his boy singer of the period, Frank Sinatra. On my singles blog, I've uploaded another fine rendition, the 1955 version by Al Hibbler.
Kostelanetz himself commissioned Kern's Mark Twain along with Aaron Copland's A Lincoln Portrait and Virgil Thomson's Mayor LaGuardia Waltzes, introducing them during a 1942 Cincinnati Symphony concert. The Copland piece can be found on this blog in the Rodziński/New York recording. I don't think Thomson's ode to Fiorello has been recorded, and I've never heard it.
Mark Twain is an enjoyably melodious work. It's not clear who handled the orchestration, although the published version available from the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization was orchestrated by Amadeo De Filippo, who was a staff arranger for CBS and other media organizations during the mid-century years.
The fourth section of the Mississippi Suite ("Mardi Gras") spawned a popular song in 1942 called "Daybreak," with lyrics by Harold Adamson. Tommy Dorsey had a hit with the tune, with a vocal by his boy singer of the period, Frank Sinatra. On my singles blog, I've uploaded another fine rendition, the 1955 version by Al Hibbler.
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| Cover of 78 set |
Mark Twain is an enjoyably melodious work. It's not clear who handled the orchestration, although the published version available from the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization was orchestrated by Amadeo De Filippo, who was a staff arranger for CBS and other media organizations during the mid-century years.
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| Jerome Kern |
The LP sound is reasonably good for the Kern; better for the Grofé. [Note (May 2023): I've now rebalanced the Kern and mastered the files in ambient stereo. The sound is much improved.] The performances are splendid.
Bonus uploads
Now for a bonanza of bonus items, courtesy of our friend 8H Haggis. As before, the links below take you to one of my posts. Once there, look in the comments for 8H's commentary and a download link or links. Also as before, these are limited-time uploads, available for a month or less.
First we have the aforementioned Grofé Mississippi Suite in the historic but truncated Whiteman recording. LINK
Tchaikovsky's Hamlet and Glazunov's Stenka Razin, in classic performances conducted by blog favorite Constant Lambert. Also, From Arthur Bliss, his 1955 recording of the Colour Symphony, and his 1935-36 and 1957 performances of the suite from Things to Come. LINK
The famous recording of Bloch's Concerto Grosso No. 1 with the Chicago Symphony under Rafael Kubelik. Plus a concert performance of Berwald's Sinfonie Singulière with Louis Lane and the Cleveland Orchestra. LINK
Stokowski's 1950 recording of Stravinsky's Firebird Suite with 8H's valiant attempt to fix its squashed dynamic range. LINK
Copland's El Salón México in both the live Toscanini-NBC broadcast of 1942 and Guido Cantelli's 1945 performance with the New York Philharmonic. Also, the underrated Walter Susskind conducting Morton Gould's Spirituals with the London Symphony. LINK
A Toscanini/NBC broadcast from 1945 with music by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Vittorio Rieti, Paul Creston and Elie Siegmeister, plus interviews with Creston and Siegmeister. LINK
Early recordings from conductor Eugene Goossens: a suite from Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty, Balakirev's Islamey, Dvořák's Carnival Overture, Falla's Ritual Fire Dance, Massenet's Le Cid ballet music, Borodin's Polovtsian Dances and Rimsky-Korsakov's Le Coq d'Or suite. LINK
A notable 1962 broadcast recording of Saint-Saëns' Organ Symphony from the Boston Symphony and Charles Munch. LINK
The classic mono recording of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra and a fantastic performance of the Kodály Concerto for Orchestra, both from Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphians. LINK
Don Gillis' tone poem, Tulsa, in the interesting Remington recording led by H. Arthur Brown. LINK
Finally, in honor of the centenarian, a live 1949 performance of Leonard Bernstein's Symphony No. 2, The Age of Anxiety, with Lenny as pianist and the Boston Symphony under his mentor, Serge Koussevitzky. LINK
So much here - thanks 8H!
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| 1943 Life Magazine ad |
Bonus uploads
Now for a bonanza of bonus items, courtesy of our friend 8H Haggis. As before, the links below take you to one of my posts. Once there, look in the comments for 8H's commentary and a download link or links. Also as before, these are limited-time uploads, available for a month or less.
First we have the aforementioned Grofé Mississippi Suite in the historic but truncated Whiteman recording. LINK
Tchaikovsky's Hamlet and Glazunov's Stenka Razin, in classic performances conducted by blog favorite Constant Lambert. Also, From Arthur Bliss, his 1955 recording of the Colour Symphony, and his 1935-36 and 1957 performances of the suite from Things to Come. LINK
The famous recording of Bloch's Concerto Grosso No. 1 with the Chicago Symphony under Rafael Kubelik. Plus a concert performance of Berwald's Sinfonie Singulière with Louis Lane and the Cleveland Orchestra. LINK
Stokowski's 1950 recording of Stravinsky's Firebird Suite with 8H's valiant attempt to fix its squashed dynamic range. LINK
Copland's El Salón México in both the live Toscanini-NBC broadcast of 1942 and Guido Cantelli's 1945 performance with the New York Philharmonic. Also, the underrated Walter Susskind conducting Morton Gould's Spirituals with the London Symphony. LINK
A Toscanini/NBC broadcast from 1945 with music by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Vittorio Rieti, Paul Creston and Elie Siegmeister, plus interviews with Creston and Siegmeister. LINK
Early recordings from conductor Eugene Goossens: a suite from Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty, Balakirev's Islamey, Dvořák's Carnival Overture, Falla's Ritual Fire Dance, Massenet's Le Cid ballet music, Borodin's Polovtsian Dances and Rimsky-Korsakov's Le Coq d'Or suite. LINK
A notable 1962 broadcast recording of Saint-Saëns' Organ Symphony from the Boston Symphony and Charles Munch. LINK
The classic mono recording of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra and a fantastic performance of the Kodály Concerto for Orchestra, both from Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphians. LINK
Don Gillis' tone poem, Tulsa, in the interesting Remington recording led by H. Arthur Brown. LINK
Finally, in honor of the centenarian, a live 1949 performance of Leonard Bernstein's Symphony No. 2, The Age of Anxiety, with Lenny as pianist and the Boston Symphony under his mentor, Serge Koussevitzky. LINK
So much here - thanks 8H!
There seems to have been a "gentlemen's agreement" midcentury to silently give the impression that Kern wrote his two extended orchestral works (this and the Show Boat "scenario") all by himself; no orchestrator would be named. But there seems no reason why they shouldn't have their credit, Charles Miller for the latter and Amadeo di Filippo for Mark Twain.
ReplyDeleteThis kind of semi-behind-the-scenes orchestration work is exactly my specialty as a researcher and musicologist, so I'm always interested to learn more.
JAC - Very odd, that. He didn't orchestrate his musicals; Robert Russell Bennett did many of them, AFAIK. Glad to have confirmation of my minor sleuthing that Amadeo di Filippo orchestrated Mark Twain. I should have asked you in the first place!
ReplyDeleteOh no -- I got the info from the same site (R&H) that you did. No other info site deigns to mention an orchestrator for the piece, and I did a fair amount of searching hoping for more corroboration. But Mr. di F belongs to the right time frame, and it's inconceivable that the work was done twice; I know the R&H people to be conscientious about investigating and giving credit in such cases.
ReplyDeleteUp to the early 20s Kern favored Frank Saddler (who often favored tiny orchestras and odd accessories like mandolin attachment for piano) as his orchestrator for stage musicals, after which he stuck with Robert Russell Bennett. To anyone curious about Kern, Stephen Banfield's recent book about him is really excellent.
When I was writing I wanted to see if Kostelanetz had modified the orchestrations, and went so far to look at his scores on the NYP website. He conducted the Philharmonic in the Grofe piece more than once and marked up the score, but there's no indication of the orchestrator.
ReplyDeleteStephen Banfield? I have his biography of Gerald Finzi. I had no idea he also wrote about popular music.
Oh yes! He also wrote a wonderful book about Sondheim. (It's challenging for those without a music analysis background, though he still has many good insights about the dramatic element.) I get thanked twice on the acknowledgments page!
ReplyDeleteAnd a two-volume work on settings of English poetry. He is, as they say, a man of parts.
Both sound very interesting. I'll have to look into them. Your citation is impressive!
ReplyDeleteI've already ordered the book on English song.
ReplyDeleteOh my. I hope I haven't steered you wrong. (That's actually his book that I don't know.)
ReplyDeleteYou haven't. That subject has long been an interest, which shows up on these pages fairly frequently. I can't believe I didn't know the book existed.
ReplyDeletewhat a treat, thanks!!
ReplyDeleteIncidentally, Buster (in addition to my thanks for pointing out my questionable contributions, such as they are) I want to correct myself again with respect to the date of Cantelli's live El Salon Mexico. Buried in the long thread was my post explaining that "1945" was a mistype; it occurred in *1955*. In 1945, Cantelli would have been a very ill man, just out of school, who had recently been liberated from a German anti-Nazi concentration camp! As I've said, the blogspot editor box misbehaves easily making it nearly impossible to proof-read; I have to write in Notepad, proof, and THEN paste into blogspot's editor, or I'm prone to such silly outbursts of nonsense.
ReplyDelete8H Haggis
Re: Cantelli - yeah, I should have caught that.
DeleteMy penance for the blunder is another Cantelli upload. I believe that these have been reprocessed in fake stereo by the French-based outfit of Andrew Rose, but MY copies predate his issues by at least 20 years. Here is a zipped folder with Cantelli-NBC Sym in Cherubini's Symphony in D (Toscanini's edited edition) from a live 1954 broadcast, and Schumann's 4th Symphony from 1952:
ReplyDeletehttps://www62.zippyshare.com/v/FaGVQCKD/file.html
Limited time upload expires around 10/5/18; 44 MB zipped with 2 mp3's and a cover image.
I should add that at least one friend has complained about my using Zippyshare without registering. He said that without extreme care one can open up web browser pages to QUESTIONABLE ads and materials. That does not happen on my Firefox browser with Adblock-Plus add-on, so I wasn't aware of that. There is one large 'radio button' that says DOWNLOAD with an arrow immediately to the right; that is what you should press and not any other importunings to click here-n-there (the sneaky ads and purported potential malware.)
8H Haggis
Oh, pardon me! I should have made a post that was more relevant to the topic: Kostelanetz! Here is a rare old Columbia LP of his that I never knew existed until a few months ago, when I found it on a Russian blog that doesn't exactly distinguish itself for high quality (they have a tendency to omit sections of pieces, or even substitute files of heavy metal or polkas in place of movements of Beethoven, Schubert, or Mahler!)
ReplyDeleteThis is a 1954 Columbia release in its CL series, consisting of Kosty and the PSNY in two suites: 'ostensibly' the RRBennett version of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, and Kosty's own arrangement of music from Tchaikovsky's opera Queen of Spades. The former is only about 17 minutes long and DOES bear a familiarity to Bennett's version though it seems to me that, in addition to cuts, it's been recorchestrated (as if it NEEDED that!); the latter was what attracted my attention. The transfer was just about the worst and most abominable garbage I've ever obtained on the Net (you get what you pay for!) but with effort, I advanced it up from 1910 sonics to...well, maybe 1940 quality (though it surely was taped somewhere around 1952-3, one imagines.)
https://www112.zippyshare.com/v/muwEXitk/file.html
(83 MB zipped FLACS, with Discogs info and cleaned-up cover image; file expires around 10/5/18.)
Finally: a request to fellow Kosty enthusiasts. Anybody have the Russian album from the late sixties: Rach's Aleko Suite? Discogs info says this:
Rachmaninoff* / Hovhaness* / André Kostelanetz And His Orchestra – Rachmaninoff: Aleko -- A Suite From The Opera And Hovhaness: Floating World -- Ukiyo
Label: Columbia – MS 7162; Format: Vinyl, LP, Stereo; Country: Canada, US
Rachmaninoff: Aleko -- A Suite From The Opera
Composed By – Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff
A1 1. Intermezzo 2:05
A2 2. Gypsy Dance 3:26
A3 3. Cavatina
Baritone Vocals [Bass-Baritone] – Simon Estes
6:29
A4 4. Girls' Dance 3:11
A5 5. Overture 2:32
B1 Hovhaness: Floating World -- Ukiyo
Composed By – Alan Hovhaness
11:47
B2 Mussorgsky: Daybreak (Introduction To "Khovantchina")
Composed By – Modest Mussorgsky
The cover is an alluring gypsy girl with a superimposed celestial image. Very nice album, with quite glossy, mannered sound in the patented Kosty/Teo Macero style. I had the LP in days of yore; sold my collection; and all I've ever found to replace it was a GHASTLY, unfixable transfer from an incompetent Japanese blog that used about 2 kbs audio encoding, producing something that sounded like it had trickled through Morse's original underwater European telegraph cable...
8H Haggis
Thanks for the transfers, as always. I don't have the Rachmaninoff-Hovhaness. I don't think I have ever seen it; I would have picked it up if I had.
DeleteOne more Kosty album: a thoroughly "respectable" and authoritative job by the New York Philharmonic of the music of three great American composers. This was one of the very first Columbia stereo Masterworks issues, and still sounds very good.
ReplyDeleteCopland's A Lincoln Portrait, with the incomparable Carl Sandburg; William Schuman's New England Triptych; and the Intermezzo from Samuel Barber's Vanessa (plus a bonus track of Gershwin: Promenade, not on the original LP.)
https://www29.zippyshare.com/v/Gmci5s18/file.html
(100 MB, four mp3s, zipped with a rather ratty scan of the original MS-series cover & Discogs info; file has limited-time availability that expires around 10/5/18.)
Post script: I've rec'd a comment from an old reader of my posts to RMCR, which I ceased contributing to many years ago. He asked, 'why haven't you ever done this before?' and my very simplified reply is this: remember "Abbedd"? He was the web's most notorious Toscanini enthusiast (I hate to use a word that implies something positive about that; maybe 'obsessive' would be better), who fancied himself "a recording engineer" (allegedly.) He has now passed away, so I would be spared his unending efforts to follow me to the ENDS OF THE EARTH, condemning me in the ripest, most vulgar, and most obscene epithets that could be uttered in at least three languages. Among his vague castigations, I was -- he averred -- "a pseudo-scientific b......t artist"; that's the only one I remember that could even be Bowdlerized into something recognizable. He produced transfers that sounded as if they had passed through the garden hose used in the 1956 Hoffnung Festival joking performance of a Michael Haydn Horn concerto--and insisted that ONLY HE had the inspired genius to bequeath such gems to the universe. More comments about him may be found in linx below, in a post to RMCR that I once considered making but wisely decided to shelve.
About my method in working on audio restoration:
https://filedn.com/lgyQ0Uu5laX4REarxi2Tv9B/8-h-haggis/jottings12.htm#BURNOUT
About trying to deal with Abbedd's reaction to my "incompetence" and "evil":
https://filedn.com/lgyQ0Uu5laX4REarxi2Tv9B/8-h-haggis/bad-restoration.htm
Finally: I am not very sanguine about the sustainability of such personal blogs and sharing in the future. I believe that the corporate/political powerstructure and authoritarians are going to *wipe all of this out*--indeed, in some ways, they have already started doing it. This may be the LAST GASP of such expression and sharing.
8H Haggis
Thanks for the Kosty upload!
DeleteHere are some saxophone works, the type of thing that Kostelanetz MIGHT have conducted in his eclectic "serious" concerts --
Delete1. Saxophone Concerti, Eugene Rousseau, sax; Paul Kuentz Chamber Orch. An old DG stereo LP that was uploaded on the infamous Japanese blog that used the USB-turntable: it had not been declicked (nor, obviously, even cleaned) and was pitifully noisy. I did what I could with it, and at least a majority of the tracks -- though not perfect -- are at least somewhat tolerable now, by my margin of endurance. Works include the Glazunov, Pierre Dubois, and Ibert sax concerti; plus Villa-Lobos Fantaisie for saxophone.
2. Nonesuch record of Saxophone works, with Vicent Abato, plus the NY Woodwind Quintet. These were very early 1950s mono recordings from Philharmonia Records, a company owned by audio pioneer Norman Pickering (who likely did the recordings.) Sylvan Schulman, a composer (and member of the Stuyvesant Quartet and NBC Symphony) conducted the Villa-Lobos Sax Cto; plus works for winds by Villa-Lobos. This was issued in mono, and fake stereo: the latter being of the primitive variety that puts the highs on the LEFT, and the lows on the RIGHT. (I left it alone, as rec'd from a friend on the east coast, who transferred his clean copy of the Nonesuch 'stereo' issue.)
{492 MB, FLACS, plus cover pix and track info; LIMITED TIME AVAILABILITY: MAY be deleted by ZS after 11/26/18, if there are no subsequent DLs in a 30 day period.}
https://www101.zippyshare.com/d/HtTGVuWO/24654/Saxophone%20Concerti%20-%20Ibert%2c%20Dubois%2c%20Villa-Lobos%2c%20Glazunov.zip
--or--
https://www101.zippyshare.com/v/HtTGVuWO/file.html
8H Haggis
Wow! Eugene Rousseau was my saxophone teacher for 5 years! A great person and a wonderful musician.
DeleteMany thanks for all these Kostelanetz rarities.
ReplyDeleteI like this multi-faceted conductor.
A real musician.
New link (ambient stereo, Apple lossless):
ReplyDeletehttps://mega.nz/file/3A0RyTKT#iBcy4lAz9gOk66Fktjx9vMlKw6pGifsmsAgAeszS4b0
thanks !!
ReplyDelete