Thor Johnson in Cincinnati: Decca Recordings

The conductor Thor Johnson (1913-75), while not a familiar name today, did make quite a few records. The ones that are remembered are principally with the Cincinnati Symphony on the short-lived Remington label. But before those sessions, he and the orchestra recorded in 1951 for the Decca company of the UK (London in the US).

UK Decca seldom if ever recorded in the States until the those sessions in the Cincinnati Music Hall. This was to be the only such recording date for the orchestra; even so, it resulted in three LPs worth of material, most of which has been assembled for this post, including music by Hugo Alfvén, Edvard Grieg, Hector Berlioz and Franz Schubert.

These are good records of - for the time - unusual repertoire. I believe only the Berlioz songs have been reissued.

About Thor Johnson

Johnson was born in Wisconsin to a family of Norwegian and German descent. His father was a Moravian minister, and he himself devoted quite a bit of time to music ministry for that denomination.

I've read that he studied with Serge Koussevitzky, but this is not mentioned in the biographical material available today, the most detailed of which is on the site devoted to Remington records. Before his 1947 ascent in Cincinnati, he had conducted the North Carolina Symphony, the Grand Rapids Symphony and, during World War II, a US Army band. For the 34-year-old Johnson to be appointed in Ohio was quite an accomplishment. His predecessors there included Leopold Stokowski, Eugene Ysaye, Fritz Reiner and Eugene Goossens.

Thor Johnson

Johnson led the Cincinnati ensemble until 1958, when he became a professor at Northwestern. He then headed the Interlochen Academy from 1964-67, becoming music director of the Nashville Symphony from 1967 until his death.

Johnson and the Cincinnati orchestra have appeared here once before - with a Remington recording of Robert Ward's Symphony No. 3 and Leon Stein's Three Hassidic Dances. (That recording is newly remastered in ambient stereo.) Johnson had a strong commitment to contemporary music, personally commissioning dozens of new works.

Alfvén - Midsommarvaka, Grieg - Suite from Sigurd Jorsalfar

We start with music reflecting Johnson's Scandinavian heritage: Hugo Alfvén's Midsommarvaka ("Midsummer Vigil"), the composer's Swedish Rhapsody No. 1, and a suite from Edvard Grieg's incidental music for Sigurd Jorsalfar, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson's play about King Sigurd I of Norway.

These works played to Johnson's strengths - orchestral discipline and, in the Alfvén, his ability to build tension throughout the performance of an episodic work. Here and in the records below he also chose unusual pieces that were not in the catalogue.

Midsommarvaka actually had been recorded several times before, but only once outside Scandinavia. The Cincinnati recording was made a few years before the opening theme of the piece became famous as the "Swedish Rhapsody," in a pop performance by Percy Faith. (Go here for an elaborate discussion of the two popular Swedish Rhapsodies, along with several disparate performances.) The Cincinnati performance also took place a few years before the composer's own early-stereo recording, which can be found here.

The Sigurd Jorsalfar incidental music consists of three pieces: a prelude, "In the King's Hall"; an intermezzo, "Borghild's Dream"; and a vigorous "Triumphal March." This suite also was not often heard at the time. The Classical Discography shows only 1925 recordings conducted by Georg Schneevoigt and Frieder Weissmann.

Second cover - I have no idea what is going on here, but Johnson seems fine with it

The Gramophone's verdict was as follows: "The Grieg incidental music I find enchanting; he had a highly individual touch with the orchestra, making his points with care; and those points Thor Johnson treats with understanding, and holds Grieg’s exquisite balance between harmonic epigram and broad statement... As in the Grieg work, we meet in Alfvén’s Swedish Rhapsody excellent playing, sympathetic conducting, and excellent recording - more uniform in its best qualities, indeed, than its partner is... The Swedish Rhapsody is engaging enough as music - immensely skilful, painstaking, energetic, even inventive."

Saturday Review's Irving Kolodin added that "the really superb performance of Alfvén's colorful score leaps off the disc with startling vitality."

LINK to Alfvén and Grieg

Berlioz - Les Nuits d'été

Like the works on the disc above, the songs from Hector Berlioz's cycle Les Nuits d'été had not often been recorded before this disc came along. The English reviewers of this LP mention two numbers that had been done by Maggie Teyte, and the discography also suggests that Tito Schipa had recorded some or all of the six.

Not only was the material unusual, it demonstrated the range of the orchestra and conductor, and introduced US audiences to the Belgian soprano Suzanne Danco (1911-2000), who had begun recording extensively for UK Decca after the war.

Suzanne Danco

Desmond Shaw-Taylor wrote in The Gramophone: "Suzanne Danco earns our gratitude by singing, for Decca, the entire cycle of Nuits d’été, which shows Berlioz at his most lyrical, fresh and inventive. It is evident that these songs are not all intended for the same type of voice; 'Sur les lagunes,' for instance demands a high baritone of the type of Gérard Souzay. There is some monotony in the shrill tones of Mme Danco’s upper register, and in 'Absence' and 'Le Spectre de la Rose' she cannot match the warmth and subtle coloration of Maggie Teyte’s famous record. (By the way, she sings the 'Spectre' in the original key of B; Maggie Teyte transposed it up to D.) Whatever the drawbacks of this recording, made in Cincinnati with the Symphony Orchestra of that city, I count it as a most valuable possession..."

Irving Kolodin in the Saturday Review: "One is conscious at times of a little acidulous bite, a shrill edge in her vocal sound, but also - and much more consistently - of her really fine musical intelligence and sense of poetic line. I'd scarcely call Thor Johnson's direction of the score a magical evocation of mood, but he makes few false moves. The total may be termed satisfactory if not deeply satisfying."

For those curious about Maggie Teyte's record, I've just posted it to my singles blog.

The LP download includes texts and translations.

LINK to Berlioz - Les Nuits d'été

Schubert - Symphony No. 3

Schubert's third symphony, written when he was 18, is a delightful work that was seldom heard then, or now. The discography and reviews suggest that there was at most one other recording in the catalogue at the time the Cincinnati LP came out.

The Gramophone reviewer's comment on the symphony: "To have this work available on gramophone records is valuable indeed, for it makes a permanent possession of a work seldom played in public, if ever. It is lovable music, bubbling over with cheerfulness, and laughter, and love, and tenderness; but I should not call the whole a great work of art. The first movement shows much promise as well as considerable achievement. The second movement is couched melodically in too nearly a nursery-rhyme idiom to appeal to my taste. The scherzo is amiable. On the whole, I consider the last movement the best of the four."

The US cover - I detect a pattern here

As for the performance, Irving Kolodin in the Saturday Review was reserved in his comments, noting that it did not show Johnson as a distinguished stylist, but adding that "he obviously has the orchestra playing with zest and unflagging attention."

In the US, the Schubert symphony was coupled with one of Johann Christian Bach's attractive Op. 18 symphonies. For this post, I worked from an Internet Archive needle drop of that London release, but the J.C. Bach side of the disc was severely damaged. I could not find another copy, so I haven't been able to include it. That's why at the top of this section I used the cover of the UK Decca 10-inch LP, which is devoted solely to the Schubert symphony. 

LINK to Schubert Symphony No. 3

Two Views of Berlioz: Norrington and Stokowski

Hector Berlioz

My friend Jean Thorel ("centuri"), himself an accomplished conductor, advocated Roger Norrington's recording of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique as a follow-up to the recent post of Sir Roger's Beethoven Ninth Symphony. Great idea - here it is, with a contrasting companion.

Norrington's are historically informed performances. As the conductor himself wrote about the Symphonie fantastique, "The joys (and tribulations) of playing Berlioz 'historically' affect every aspect then: the score, the instruments, the style, even the layout of the stage." As such his recording was very unlike the ones that that had preceded it, which sometimes seem to take their cue from the work's lurid program, which involves an artist taking opium because of his unrequited love.

This sensational premise - and the scenes that involve a march to the scaffold and a witches' Sabbath - seem to invite or even require Romantic excess in performance. For this reason, I decided to couple Norrington's chaste version with one by the high priest of the Technicolor performance, Leopold Stokowski, leading a modern orchestra. It's quite a contrast.

But before we get to the performances, let's examine the notion that Berlioz himself was a wild-eyed Romantic - even considering the Symphonie fantastique program. First, consider that this symphony postdates Beethoven's Ninth by only six years - 1824 to 1830. Second, Berlioz himself was a famously skilled and fastidious composer and orchestrator. As Wilfrid Mellers has written, the symphony is "ostensibly autobiographical, yet fundamentally classical ... Far from being romantic rhapsodizing held together only by an outmoded literary commentary, the Symphonie fantastique is one of the most tautly disciplined works in early nineteenth-century music."

An 1846 caricature of Berlioz - no wonder he was considered a wild-eyed Romantic

So following the composer's instructions and using an orchestra he would have recognized should lead to revelatory results. And some reviewers found this to be the case following the release of Norrington's recording in 1989.

Stereo Review's Richard Freed wrote, "There's no need to debate whether Berlioz was actually the first great Romanticist or the last great Classicist. The point is that no one understood the orchestra and its instruments better than he did, and it was that profound understanding that enabled him to exploit orchestral color with such unprecedented imaginativeness. That, in brief, would seem to be the basis for Norrington's undertaking - an approach to Berlioz, as to Beethoven, on the composer's own terms - and it turns out to be productive beyond imagining, even more revelatory than his Beethoven performances...

"Before I got to the end I knew that this was the Fantastique that will be the 'basic' recording from now on, and the others will be the alternates."

But that was 35 years ago, and the sound of the modern symphony orchestra is still ascendant. The Norrington approach - while influential - remains the exception rather than the rule. Examine the many "best-of" articles on the Symphonie fantastique and you will find performances by any number of modern orchestras, with at most one "historically informed" reading, usually the one led by Sir John Eliot Gardiner.

Here are today's two recordings.

London Classical Players/Roger Norrington

Norrington and his orchestra recorded the Berlioz work in March 1988 at Abbey Road. As with the Beethoven disc recently heard here, the recorded sound was drab, which undercuts the delights of the composer's scoring as performed by instruments of his time. This is supposition, but perhaps the engineers recorded the orchestra similar to the way they would handle modern orchestras, which generally are much larger and louder than Norrington's forces. I have adjusted the balance accordingly.

Even so, the performance was much appreciated. Here's John Warrack in The Gramophone: "Prepared, and recorded, with the greatest attention to detail, it is a performance of imaginative sweep and excitement, and a record by which future performance of the work will have to be measured."

This transfer comes from a sealed copy of the original vinyl release. The LP had no notes whatsoever, so I have included a PDF of the CD booklet, which includes essays by Norrington and Berlioz expert Hugh Macdonald.

Sir Roger Norrington

LINK to Norrington performance

New Philharmonia Orchestra/Leopold Stokowski

The Symphonie fantastique and its queasy program - which Berlioz later downplayed - would seem to have been made for Leopold Stokowski, one of the most extroverted of 20th century maestros. But somehow he did not record the work until 1968, when he was 83. Decca London provided a multi-miked Phase 4 Stereo production for the occasion.

The results are predictable. Where the harps in the "Un bal" movement sound discreet if delightful for Norrington, for Stoki the single harp is as loud than the rest of the orchestra. Conversely, the orchestral sound at times is quite recessed in a reverberant space (Kingsway Hall), but then a solo flute will suddenly jump to the foreground.

As for the conductor, he is on his best behavior for much of the symphony - unlike a live performance from about the same time that was later released. Harris Goldsmith wrote in High Fidelity: "For the first three movements, Stokowski is really quite restrained. The string tone is, of course, gorgeous and while the playing is always imaginative and full of refined sheen, the tempos and phrasings are not terribly removed from the mainstream of traditional interpretation... In the 'Marche au supplice,' though, Stokowski does adopt a too precipitate approach - one would almost think that the hero in question was attempting to flee justice rather than offering himself as a willing victim to the scaffold... When we arrive at the 'Witches' Sabbath,' however, the conductor really starts substituting LSD for Berlioz' opium." To sum up, Stoki sounds uninvolved until he gets to the juicy parts.

Despite his observations, Goldsmith was positive: "Not my favorite Fantastique perhaps (I prefer the Davis version on Philips), but an attractive and stimulating one, nonetheless."

I'll leave it to you to decide which one is better - Stokowski or Norrington.

Leopold Stokowski

LINK to Stokowski performance

Berlioz and Weinberger from Cleveland and Rodziński

Artur Rodziński

Today we have more of the recordings Artur Rodziński made with the Cleveland Orchestra during his decade as its music director (1933-43). They include one of their first recordings, of Jaromir Weinberger's Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree, and a later session devoted to Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique.

Berlioz - Symphonie Fantastique

The Berlioz piece is the more substantial, so let's examine that recording first. It derives from an April 14, 1941 session in Severance Hall solely devoted to the work.

As far as I can tell, this is the only time the conductor turned his attention to Berlioz in the recording studio. Rodziński's emphasis on clarity and discipline are always admirable, but perhaps not the first qualities that come to mind when thinking about the music of Berlioz. I generally admire the conductor's approach, but this is a work that perhaps requires more fantasy than Rodziński could evoke. My favorite recording is led by Leonard Bernstein with the Orchestre National de France in the 1970s. He emphasizes the hallucinatory qualities of the work, which supposedly were influenced by Berlioz's experience with opium. 

The composer had developed a program for the work which involves a despairing young artist, an obsessive love, an opium-induced dream of his own execution and finally a witches' sabbath. But he later downplayed the program, writing in the preface to its second edition, "The author hopes that the symphony provides on its own sufficient musical interest independently of any dramatic intention." This is certainly the spirit in which Rodziński takes up the work, but one can't help but feel that something is missing. (The New York Times' Howard Taubman would disagree; he praised the recording's "driving, biting impact" in his 1942 review, and the reviewer in The New Records was similarly enthusiastic. These notices and two concert reviews are in the download.)

The transfer came from a early-1950s Columbia Entré LP with reasonably good sound.

Weinberger - Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree

Jaromir Weinberger

The Symphonie Fantastique was well over a century old when Rodziński recorded it, but Jaromir Weinberger's Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree had premiered in October 1939, only a few months before the date with the Columbia engineers.

The Bohemian Weinberger (1896-1967) was newly arrived in the U.S., one of the many refugees from Hitler's Germany. His reputation as a composer had been made 13 years before with the success of his Schwanda the Bagpiper. The Polka and Fugue from this opera are heard even today on orchestral programs.

Weinberger was a facile composer with a gift for melody; both characteristics are apparent in the work under discussion, which has the formal name "Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree," Variations and Fugue on an Old English Tune. The old tune in question was likely originally a dance; it had been set by Giles Farnaby and William Byrd 300 years earlier.

John Barbirolli premiered Weinberger's work with the New York Philharmonic in October 1939, but did not record it. Rodziński raced Constant Lambert into the studio to deliver the premiere recording. Lambert's session with the London Philharmonic was on December 21, 1939. Sources differ on the Cleveland date: Michael Gray says it was December 13, 1939; Donald Rosenberg in The Cleveland Orchestra Story specifies January 9-10, 1940.

The Weinberger is an enjoyable piece neatly done by the Clevelanders. My transfer is taken from a 1970s Cleveland Orchestra promotional LP. The album is marked stereo, but as far as I can tell, the only stereo signal consists of surface noise and a very loud rumble, which I have eliminated. Note (February 2024): in preparing the Lambert recording for a post, I noticed that the Rodziński was considerably off-pitch, which I have now rectified.

The download includes reviews of the recording from the New York Times and The New Records, an article by Weinberger published a few days before the concert premiere, and a review of the premiere itself.

One final note: the pianist in the work is Boris Goldovsky, then the Cleveland chorus master, later an opera conductor and impresario and radio personality on the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts.

LINK

Rodziński admires his likeness, produced by sculptor William McVay