Solomon's Final Recordings

A debilitating stroke ended the career of the great English pianist Solomon (1902-88) in late 1956, a few months after he had made several concerto recordings with the Philharmonia Orchestra and conductor Herbert Menges.

Today's post gathers those four works together - Beethoven's first and third, and the Grieg and Schumann concertos. These are all mainstays of the repertoire, just as Solomon's recordings have been standards by which others have been judged for nearly 70 years.

This is a follow-up to my recent post of Solomon in works by Bliss and Liszt, which was well received. Some personal sentiment enters into it as well, for I have owned all these recordings for several decades, and remain fond of them.

The artist who recorded these four concertos was different from the phenomenon who had dispatched the difficulties of the Bliss concerto seemingly effortlessly. These final sessions were afflicted with technical problems that left the pianist almost in despair. Solomon's biographer, Bryan Crimp, wrote that the Grieg concerto sessions "proved to be a desolate and wholly demoralizing experience, with Solomon's incapacity at its worrisome height, possibly exacerbated by the intensive work of the previous days." Even so, none of these travails are evident on the final product. The success of the recording, Crimp noted, "is a reflection of the skill and patience of all concerned: producers and editors, orchestra and conductor, but above all to the supreme effort of the soloist." The slow movement is a particular delight, with lovely horn playing, presumably by Dennis Brain.

Herbert Menges

The conductor Herbert Menges had been Solomon's friend since they were fellow piano students of Mathilde Verne. Menges had been associated with the Old Vic and was the conductor of the Brighton Philharmonic and its successors. EMI engaged him fairly frequently as a concerto accompanist, and these performances are successful in that regard.

Contemporary reviews of these recordings generally fall into two camps - those who were satisfied with the pianist's refinement and poetic playing, others who longed for more passion, which Solomon may no longer have been able to summon. Reviewing the Beethoven first concerto in the American Record Guide, C.J. Luten writes, "He has a pearly, singing tone, a genuine legato, and a fine mechanism. Moreover, his general culture and musical manners are as refined as anyone could wish for. His work invariably gives the pleasure of order and beauty of sound. Solomon's playing would be unforgettable if only he had temperament."

The wonder is that these performances have seldom been out of the catalogue since they were issued, a few years after they were made. Despite what Luten wrote above, I find the Beethoven concertos to be entirely successful, as is the Grieg. But to me, the Schumann finale would benefit from the some of the fire Solomon brought to the Bliss concerto, but may have no longer been able to ignite.

On the LP, Beethoven's first concerto is paired with his Sonata No. 27, which Solomon also handles well. (Note that the Sonata also appears on the transfer of the Beethoven third concerto that I used.) The sonata comes from an August 1956 session, also in stereo.

The recordings were all made in Abbey Road Studio No. 1 and are in true stereo, which is one of the delights of the set. Later reviewers would complain that there was little "stereo spread," having become accustomed to the use of multiple microphones in orchestral recordings. But these simply-miked performances have a convincing coherence that is unobtrusively right. My only cavil is that there is little bloom on the strings, possibly an artifact of the studio, which is not all that large. 

The HMV covers

I did not transfer my well-used records for this post, relying instead on good copies I found on Internet Archive and refurbished for the purpose. The Beethoven Concerto No. 1 is from a US Angel pressing, the Concerto No. 3 is from a EMI reissue from the 1960s, and the Grieg and Schumann are from a Classics for Pleasure 1976 reissue. The downloads include complete scans along with the original HMV covers. The latter were designed in a simple, elegant form by Atelier Cassandre, which did quite a few such covers for EMI at the time, probably through its French associate, La Voix de son maître. The download also has many reviews of the three LPs.

 

Hollingsworth Conducts Humperdinck and Grieg

The English conductor John Hollingsworth (1916-63) was a fine talent who died too young. We recently heard him conducting Malcolm Arnold's Tam O'Shanter Overture in a 1955 Philips LP where he shared conducting duties with the composer. Today he leads the Covent Garden orchestra in music by Engelbert Humperdinck and Edvard Grieg.

John Hollingsworth

These are good, well-recorded performances that came out on EMI's Parlophone label in 1953 and have not been seen again, to my knowledge. The M-G-M folks issued the recordings in the US.

At the time of the recordings, Hollingsworth had already gained experience in film industry working with Muir Mathieson, at Covent Garden both in opera and ballet, and at the Proms assisting Sir Malcolm Sargent. Hollingsworth would continue his film work in later years and was very active in that realm until his early death from pneumonia. The download includes a 1954 Music and Musicians article about him.

His commercial recordings, which are not many, are primarily of lighter music. The current selections fit into that category, and are most enjoyable.

The most recent Hänsel und Gretel production at Covent Garden

The German composer Humperdinck these days is remembered primarily for one work, but an enchanting one - his children's opera Hänsel und Gretel, based on the brothers Grimm story. Hollingsworth recorded five selections from the orchestral suite, all memorable.

The second side of the LP contains music by Grieg. First is a three-movement suite that the composer extracted from his incidental music for a production of Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson's play Sigurd Jorsalfar.

Grieg's Two Elegiac Melodies were orchestral transcriptions of two songs from a set of 12 with texts by Aasmund Olavsson Vinje. The melodies' titles, "The Wounded Heart" and "The Last Spring," are taken from those songs.

I've enclosed several brief reviews of the US M-G-M pressing; the reactions to the performances ranged from "admirable" to "competent."

Bonus - Ibert's Circus

In 1952, Hollingsworth recorded the Circus music that Jacques Ibert wrote for Gene Kelly's film Invitation to the Dance (a film that did not come out until 1956). The conductor led the Royal Philharmonic for that assignment.

M-G-M issued the music on a soundtrack disc, where it was paired with Andre Previn's brilliant pastiche, Ring Around the Rosy. Truthfully, neither the Ibert piece nor the recording is as good as Previn's music and his spectacular piano playing. As I wrote in 2014 when I first posted the soundtrack recording, "You will hear echoes of Britten, Khachaturian (!) and Gershwin, Kenton-style stentorian jazz, blues piano, salon music, mood music and much more."

I've now remastered the record, clarifying the sound of the Ibert while doing additional cleaning on the awful M-G-M pressing. You can find the link in the comments both to this post and the original item. 

Back to Hollingsworth: I also have his recording of Constant Lambert's Meyerbeer ballet score, Les Patineurs, which I'll post later on. It's coupled with the first recording of Bliss' Checkmate score, led by Robert Irving.

Hanson's Piano Concerto with Firkušný

Howard Hanson made a long series of recordings of music by himself and other American composers for the Mercury label in the 1950s. The stereo recordings are fairly well known, mostly for their supposed audiophile qualities; the mono recordings less so.

I recently featured one of those early mono Mercurys, and the response was good. So I'll be revisiting some of the other LPs in Mercury's Modern American Music Series soon.

But first, one of the few recordings that Hanson and the Eastman-Rochester Orchestra made for Columbia, this one issued in 1951. The main item of interest is the conductor's piano concerto in its first recording, with soloist Rudolf Firkušný, who introduced the work with Hanson and the Boston Symphony in late 1948.

After an opening reminiscent of Hanson's second symphony, we quickly are off into territory that is more like Prokofiev, and none the worse for that, particularly with Firkušný in excellent form.

Hanson's Mercury recordings were all-American, but here he backs up his own music with that of Grieg -not the most vibrant Holberg Suite in my experience. I suppose the connection is Nordic (as the cover suggests). These recordings have not been reissued, to my knowledge.

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