Constant Lambert Conducts Boyce, Rossini, Offenbach and Suppé

For some time, we've been presenting the works that Constant Lambert (1901-51) produced as composer, arranger and conductor. For today's post Lambert assumes the latter two roles. The main work is his arrangement of the music of the English baroque composer William Boyce for the 1940 Vic-Wells ballet The Prospect Before Us. Completing the program are his recordings of popular works by Gioachino Rossini, Jacques Offenbach and Franz von Suppé.

Boyce-Lambert - The Prospect Before Us

The Prospect Before Us - act drop

Lambert was a proponent of the music of his baroque-period predecessor William Boyce (1711-79). He edited Boyce's symphonies for publication and arranged his music for use in the comic ballet The Prospect Before Us, which opened in summer 1940 with choreography by Ninette de Valois.

The ballet was suggested by a 1791 print of the same name by the English caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson (1757-1827), which depicts cavorting dancers on the stage of the Kings Theatre. (See below - I've brightened and clarified the faded original.)

Thomas Rowlandson - The Prospect Before Us

For the work, de Valois constructed a scenario pivoting on two rival theatrical managers who fight over the best dancers, with it all ending up with the calamity depicted on Roger Furse's act-drop at the top of this section.

Robert Helpmann

The download includes several of Furse's sketches for the costumes and a number of the publicity photos for the production. One such is Robert Helpmann's dance as one of the managers, shown above.

Lambert took the Sadler's Wells Orchestra into Abbey Road Studio No. 1 on August 1, 1940, less than a month after the ballet opened. The performance is as lively and high-spirited as the ballet must have been. The work was a popular success, serving as a diversion from the realities of wartime.

The download also includes reviews from The New Records and from The Gramophone, the latter of which provides a useful synopsis of the ballet.

Rossini - William Tell Ballet Music

Detail from 1939 Gramophone ad

Lambert also conducted his Sadler's Wells Orchestra in this 1939 Kingsway Hall recording of the ballet music from Rossini's opera William Tell. The sessions were not in conjunction with a Vic-Wells performance, as far as I can determine.

Some parts of this music may be familiar from having appeared in re-orchestrated form in Britten's Matinées and Soirées Musicales. Much of it is delightful, although the Gramophone reviewer drolly and accurately noted that, "There is a cornet solo of the kind beloved of the pier on Part 2." The music is very well performed and recorded, and as always, Lambert's touch is sure.

Offenbach - Orpheus in the Underworld Overture

Although he was the Vic-Wells music director, Lambert also recorded with orchestras other than the Sadler's Wells forces. Here, just a month after the Rossini recording, he was again in the Kingsway Hall, this time with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. The session was again devoted to music from the opera - the delightful overture to Offenbach's comic masterpiece Orpheus in the Underworld.

That's not to say that Offenbach actually wrote the overture per se - it was apparently concocted by the Austrian Carl Binder for a performance in Vienna. Nor was the concluding "can-can" originally devised as such. This galop from the score was co-opted by the Folies Bergère folks for their famous dance well after Offenbach's death.

Perhaps needless to say, Lambert and the orchestra do this to a turn - although I will note that the LPO's playing is not superior to that of the Sadler's Wells band in the recordings above.

Suppé - Overture Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna

While two of Franz von Suppé's best known and most parodied works are overtures to two of his seldom-heard operettas (Poet and Peasant and Light Cavalry), the third was an early, stand-alone overture titled Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna. Like the others, it was used as the backdrop to a mid-century cartoon, in this case one of Bugs Bunny's conducting escapades.

Although I much admire Lambert, he did favor a few composers who leave me cold, notably Liszt but also Suppé, whose music strikes me as noisily insubstantial. That said, Lambert makes the most of the piece in this 1950 Kingsway Hall recording with the Philharmonia Orchestra, made near the end of the conductor's short life.

The transfers for all these works come to us through the good graces of Internet Archive, and were edited and remastered by me. The sound is uniformly excellent for its period.

Ormandy Conducts Romantic Favorites

For one of the greatest conductors of the 20th century, it's amazing how many of Eugene Ormandy's mono recordings have not been re-released, at least as far as I have been able to determine. Today's post includes several of those elusive items, all dating from near mid-20th century.

The program encompasses two 10-inch LPs and an EP, all on Columbia Records.

 

Sibelius and Rachmaninoff

 

The first LP couples Sibelius' "Finlandia" and "The Swan of Tuonela" with Lucien Cailliet's effective orchestrations of three Rachmaninoff piano preludes, including the composer's greatest hit, the Prelude in C-sharp minor (Bum - bum - BUMM. Da - da - da. Bum - bum - BUMM).

 

John Minsker

The Rachmaninoff works are in turns grandiloquent (the C-sharp minor), tranquil (the G major) and dramatic (the G minor). Cailliet had been a Philadelphia clarinetist who wrote arrangements both for Leopold Stokowski and Ormandy. 

 

Sibelius' "Finlandia" was a favorite of Ormandy, who recorded it six times, twice with chorus. The "Swan of Tuonela" is beautifully done here, with an eloquent and elegant English horn solo by the eminent John Minsker.

 

Suppé and Weber

The second 10-inch LP couples Franz von Suppé's famous and much abused overture to the operetta Poet and Peasant with the overture to Carl Maria von Weber's opera Der Freischütz.

 

The Poet and Peasant is just fine, but I will take issue with the performance of the Freischütz overture, a favorite of mine, which barely hints at the dramatic or supernatural elements of the opera.

 

The Weber overture is the earliest recording among all these items, dating from January 1946 and first issued on 78. The Suppé work comes from a April 1950 session. It too was issued first on 78, then about a year later with the Weber as one of the first issues in Columbia's 10-inch AL series. These early AL discs contained barely more music than the 7-inch EPs that soon would gain favor. The first AL releases all were contained in generic covers with the fussy design shown above. The download includes an article on the series.

 

Strauss and Tchaikovsky

 

On the EP, we have the Waltz Suite from Richard Strauss' opera Der Rosenkavalier, coupled with another famous waltz, drawn from Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings. These works are all in Ormandy's wheelhouse. He and the superb Philadelphians do well by them. The EP has a bonus of a wonderful Jim Flora cover depicting the "Presentation of the Rose" from Rosenkavalier. The knight does appear to be sniffing the flower, rather than presenting it to the bored Sophie. (You will need to click on the image to see what I am talking about.)

Ormandy recorded music from Der Rosenkavalier seven times; he chose this waltz suite three times, once with the Minneapolis Symphony in 1935, then with the Philadelphia ensemble in 1941 and 1952. This is the latter version.

 

The Rosenkavalier waltzes also came out on an all-Strauss 12-inch LP a few years later, coupled with Don Juan, Till Eulenspiegel and the Love Scene from Feuersnot. Missing no formats or coupling alternatives, Columbia at one time packaged the Rosenkavalier and Eulenspiegel recordings on a 10-inch disc. It featured Jim Flora artwork that was apparently designed as a companion to the EP cover shown above. I don't have the Strauss LP, but I did scrounge up the cover, which you can see at right. It shows Till Eulenspiegel engaged in his "merry pranks," which seem to be taking place at Watts Towers.

 

The Tchaikovsky waltz is extracted from one of Ormandy's complete recordings of the Serenade, which come from 1946, 1952 and 1960. Discographer Michael Gray claims that the 1952 version remains unissued, so this is apparently the 1946 edition.

The complete Serenade for Strings was coupled on an early Columbia LP with John Barbirolli's New York recording of the Theme and Variations from Tchaikovsky's Suite No. 3. 

 

Bonus Item on Buster's Swinging Singles

 

Full disclosure - the Strauss-Tchaikovsky EP is a new transfer of a disc I featured on my other blog many years ago. But there also is something new on that blog to go along with this post - the 1946 Ormandy/Philadelphia recording of Glinka's Ruslan and Ludmila Overture. I've contrasted it with a competing version from the Boston Pops and Arthur Fiedler, dating from 1939 - which I prefer, but make your own decision!