Anshel Brusilow Conducts French Music

The talented conductor, violinist and writer Anshel Brusilow died last week. As a memorial, I prepared this transfer of one of his few recordings as a conductor.

Brusilow, a student of Efrem Zimbalist and once a protege of Pierre Monteux, was the associate concertmaster of the Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell, and then concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy. He had conducting ambitions, however, leading a chamber group of Philadelphia Orchestra musicians for a few years, and then striking out to form his own professional ensemble, the Chamber Symphony of Philadelphia, in 1966.

Anshel Brusilow

Brusilow shrewdly had an RCA Victor recording contract in hand even before the Chamber Symphony's first concert, and today's post is one of the projects he completed before the ensemble ran out of funds in 1968.

This LP of 20th century French works is the final product of that association, and it is a very good one. Ravel's familiar suite "Le Tombeau de Couperin" is complemented by the less often heard music of Jean Françaix and Jacques Ibert. Francaix's delightful Sérénade has been featured on this blog before, in a vintage performance led by Eugen Jochum, but this is the first appearance for Ibert's pictorialist Suite Symphonique and Capriccio. The Ravel has previously appeared here in a Dimitri Mitropoulos recording from Minneapolis.

After his Philadelphia days, Brusilow moved to Texas, first as music director of the Dallas Symphony, and then in university posts. In addition to his RCA recordings, he also made a few discs in Bournemouth and Dallas.

Late in life, Brusilow produced an amusing memoir, Shoot the Conductor: Too Close to Monteux, Szell and Ormandy, which I have been reading of late. The photos in this post come from that book.

The cover art may strike the contemporary eye as garish, but that was the style 50 years ago. The colorful illustration is by Mozelle Thompson, a favorite of my friend and fellow blogger Ernie. RCA's sound is vivid and immediate.

The Chamber Symphony of Philadelphia

Invitation to the Dance - Music by Ibert and Previn

Despite being made right after An American in Paris and Singin' in the Rain, Invitation to the Dance was not a successful venture for the great Gene Kelly. It was a departure in that it was an anthology film with three separate stories, all told entirely through the medium of dance. The studio did not have faith in the result, so it was shelved from 1952 to 1956.

This soundtrack LP contains the original music for two of the three segments - "Circus" and "Ring Around the Rosy." The third section, was set to music adapted from Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade. This part, which matches Kelly with cartoon characters, may be more familiar than the other parts of the movie because it has been anthologized.

Gene Kelly as sad clown

The first story in the trilogy is "Circus," a laugh-clown-laugh story with Gene as the broken-hearted and ultimately tragic figure. So the film started on a dour story - and an overly familiar one, at that. The music, however, is excellent. It came from the contemporary French eclectic Jacques Ibert, best known for Escales, recorded in the 50s by both Munch and Ormandy, with their respective ensembles. Here the good performance is by the Royal Philharmonic and John Hollingsworth.

With Tamara Toumanova in "Ring Around the Rosy"

Accomplished as it may be, that music is eclipsed by the wonderfully varied score for "Ring Around the Rosy" from composer-pianist-conductor André Previn, then still a Hollywood wunderkind. (He was 23 when the film was shot and 27 when it came out.) You will hear echoes of Britten, Khachaturian (!) and Gershwin, Kenton-style stentorian jazz, blues piano, salon music, mood music and much more. "Ring Around the Rosy" is a La Ronde-inspired journey that follows a bracelet as it passes from one person to another, with Previn switching styles at least as often as the bauble changes owners. The score is brilliantly played by the M-G-M Studio Orchestra with Previn himself at the piano.

The sound is better for Previn's contributions than Ibert's, but fine in both cases.