Two Views of Britten's 'Ceremony of Carols'

Benjamin Britten

Benjamin Britten wrote his A Ceremony of Carols in 1942, for boys' voices and harp. Today we have two recordings of this gorgeous work, from two distinguished choirs - the women's voices of the Robert Shaw Chorale and the Choir of St. John's College, Cambridge.

The St. John's Choir, led by George Guest, also includes Britten's Rejoice in the Lamb and Missa Brevis. Shaw fills out his disc - or rather leads it - with Poulenc's Mass in G.

The Choir of St. John's College, Cambridge

Britten had a well-known antipathy for the cultured singing such as produced the more famous ensemble at Cambridge, the Choir of King's College Chapel. (That did not deter King's from recording the work, however.)

The critic Edward Greenfield characterized the singing of the Københavns Drengekor, which the composer conducted in a 1953 recording, as "tough." He was, however, impressed with the St. John's version: "[T]ime after time in my comparisons I have been delighted by the extra responsiveness of the St. John’s singing. The Danish boys may just outshine St. John’s in the jazzy rhythms of 'Deo Gracias' or in the Orff-like narration of the same carol, but the word-pointing and the contrasts of tone and dynamic are far better controlled throughout by the Cambridge boys and the crescendo at the end is over-whelming," he wrote in The Gramophone.

Britten may have been less pleased. The Decca Discography contains this parenthetical note: "Following publication, the composer requested a re-make of incorrect passages, which was done on 8 Aug 66 and that version was used for subsequent copies." I believe the transfer here is from the revised version. The original recording sessions were in December 1964.

George Guest

My own view is that this record is a fine achievement, not just for the Ceremony of Carols, but for the Missa Brevis and Rejoice in the Lamb. The Welsh conductor George Guest (1924-2002) led the St. John's Choir from 1951-91, greatly enhancing its international reputation.

Marisa Robles

I believe this may have been the first recording for the harpist Marisa Robles. Greenfield presciently predicted a great career for her, which has been the case.

This performance benefits from atmospheric stereo from St. John's.

LINK to the St. John's disc

The Robert Shaw Chorale

Robert Shaw must have liked A Ceremony of Carols. He recorded it twice for RCA Victor (in 1949 and 1964) and for Telarc (in 1997).

In 1949, Victor apparently did not have high hopes for the Britten work - the LP cover subordinates his composition to Poulenc's Mass in G.

Britten wrote A Ceremony of Carols for a boys' choir, but Shaw recorded it with six women's voices from his chorale. Not all critics were pleased. Irving Kolodin wrote in the Saturday Review, "1t is heartening to see the appreciation of a good work, such as Britten’s 'Ceremony of Carols,' implemented by the vast resources of publicity and distribution possessed by RCA Victor. It is less heartening to observe a treatment which accords with the great American penchant for expediency (that is to say, the use of an available women’s choir, rather than the more desirable boys’ voices)."

Seventy-five years later, it is possible to admire the artistry of these singers and their conductor, while also noting that the recording presents little of the atmosphere that can be found in the St. John's performance - the ceremonial aspect is missing.

Laura Newell

The harp in this performance is played by the versatile Laura Newell, who has been heard here before in Debussy and as a member of the swing group The New Friends of Rhythm.

Francis Poulenc

Poulenc's Mass in G was the subject of extravagant praise from the critics of the day. The American Record Guide was overwhelmed: "This Mass, stark, bare, unadorned as it may be, in the fifteen minutes duration is as filled with the distilled essence of devotion, of genuine religious feeling as any of the full-length scores of the classical or baroque periods. 1 know of no unaccompanied work in the modern idiom that can approach it; one would have to travel as back as Palestrina for serious competition." I mostly hear the stark, bare, unadorned aspect of the work, although it is earnest and well performed here.

Victor's sound is typical of the time - clear and not very atmospheric.

LINK to the Robert Shaw Chorale disc

Note: I have uploaded quite a few of Shaw's recordings in the past. You can find them here - including his 1946 and 1952 Christmas albums.

'Toscanini's Hep Cats' - The New Friends of Rhythm, Plus Maxine Sullivan

The New Friends of Rhythm, 1938: Sylvan Shulman, Harry Patent, Zelly Smirnoff, Laura Newell, Tony Colucci, Alan Shulman, Louis Kievman

They were known as "Toscanini's hep cats," at least to the Victor publicists, because most of them played in the Maestro's NBC Symphony in its heyday. Their "formal" name, however, was the New Friends of Rhythm, a takeoff on the New Friends of Music, a New York concert society.

Today's post is devoted to these friendly hep cats and the complete set of their 16 1939-40 Victor recordings. Plus there is a bonus six-song album the group recorded with vocalist Maxine Sullivan in 1947.

About the New Friends

The New Friends specialized in a sort of genteel swing, usually involving riffs on classical pieces. At its base it consisted of the Stuyvesant String Quartet (originally Sylvan Shulman and Zelly Smirnoff, violins, Louis Kievman, viola, and Alan Shulman, cello) and harpist Laura Newell. The Shulmans, Kievman and Newell were members of the NBC Symphony. The NBC studio orchestra supplied Smirnoff, guitarist Tony Colucci and bassist Harry Patent. In 1940, Harry Glickman succeeded Smirnoff in the second violin chair.

Alan Shulman was the guiding force behind the group. His arrangements were to become highly influential; he taught Nelson Riddle, perhaps the most famous pop arranger of the 20th century. Riddle's biographer Peter Levinson acknowledges the influence in his book September in the Rain, while noting that Shulman himself acknowledged being shaped by the work of Robert Russell Bennett. 

These Shulman arrangements emphasize lightly swinging textures, but Shulman also had a romantic bent, which can be heard in a 1946 Risë Stevens collection of love songs, which I uploaded a few years ago. Sylvan Shulman conducted that set. Alan was also a fine composer whose work was often heard on concert programs of the day.

Sylvan Shulman, Laura Newell and Alan Shulman

The group both literally (see photo above) and figuratively revolved around harpist Laura Newell. The download includes an article on her and the group by Alan's son Jay from the American Harp Journal. It provides a detailed background on the New Friends, starting with the story that the Shulmans gifted Toscanini with their records as a Christmas present. (This, too, sounds like a publicist's confection.)

Laura Newell has appeared on the blog in Debussy's Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp with Julius Baker and Lilian Fuchs.

My friend Bryan featured the Stuyvesant Quartet several times on his blog, The Shellackophile, now regrettably dormant. His posts include music of Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Bloch, reflecting the group's commitment to contemporary music. Also there are another recording of the Debussy sonata with Laura Newell, and her recording of the Ravel Introduction and Allegro with the Stuyvesants and others. Bryan even has a disc by the Kreiner String Quartet, which the Shulmans played in while enrolled at Juilliard. The links remain active.

The Complete Victor Recordings

The New Friends owed their Victor recording contract to NBC's Frank Black, who had heard them play and put them on NBC's "Magic Key" program, sponsored by RCA. Enzo Archetti of the American Music Lover praised the performance. He inaccurately claimed that the group was "a combination of Raymond Scott, the Hot Club of Paris and a jam session, and yet original enough to be quite fascinating." Actually, the Friends had nothing to do with Django and certainly their written-out parts were hardly the makings of a jam session. The only connection with Scott's music was its tightly arranged numbers and its offbeat titles, which usually gave a clue to the music's origins (which in any case were decoded on the labels of the crew's Victor 78s).

Hubert shoots the Schubert

Most of the numbers are classical takeoffs, and Shulman manages to keep them from the cheesy quality that afflicted the swing bands' usual classical adaptations, and avoids the parody element that Spike Jones among others brought to the music. There also were a few of Alan's originals and some miscellaneous arrangements.

The group's first session was in late March 1939, and encompassed Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Paganini and "When Johnny Comes Marching Home." They were back in the studio in late June for Back, Raff, more Tchaikovsky and the "Londonderry Air."

In November, they took on Brahms, Stephen Foster, Shulman's "High Voltage," and Schubert. The latter bore the title, "Shoot the Schubert to Me Hubert." This was undoubtedly related to Tommy Dorsey's record of "Shoot the Sherbet to Me Herbert" of a few months earlier.

The Friends' final Victor session was in May 1940, and devoted to Dinicu, Paganini, "Sweet Sue" and Shulman's "Mood in Question."

Buster Bailey

The Friends' Victor recordings did garner some good reviews (several are in the download) and had sold some 20,000 copies by June 1940, per a Time magazine article that surely was relying on a group's publicist. That seems like a lot, but didn't represent hit status even back then, which may be why the Victor output ceased after the May 1940 session.

The final session, which apparently wasn't released until 1943, featured the welcome addition of Buster Bailey, one of the most gifted and fluent of all jazz clarinetists. In its review, the jazz magazine Downbeat opined. "This disc is a direct slap at all those who claim strings impede swing. Here the strings themselves sensibly don't try for any solos. They aren't jazz men and they don't claim to be able to do that sort of thing - but their background is rich and colorful, and gives Bailey a terrific basis on which to swing." 

The 1947 Session with Maxine Sullivan

Maxine Sullivan in 1947

The New Friends of Rhythm returned to recording after the war with two 1947 sessions for the small International label: one on their own, the other with the superb singer Maxine Sullivan. I don't have the former set, but the latter makes up the second part of our program.

Sullivan had come to prominence with her 1937 recording of the Scottish tune "Loch Lomond," made with a small group led by Claude Thornhill. It was a huge hit, and led to her featuring such traditional fare throughout her career.

The six-song International album is split between three of these swinging-the-old-tunes numbers and three standards. A remake of "Loch Lomond" leads off the proceedings, which also include "If I Had a Ribbon Bow" and "Jackie Boy," both of which she had recorded before. The pop songs were Noel Coward's "Mad About the Boy," the Vernon Duke -Ira Gershwin "I Can't Get Started" and the Dorothy Fields-Jimmy McHugh "I Must Have That Man." 

It's always a pleasure to hear a singer as accurate and clear as Sullivan. Her ability to swing most any kind of material is welcome, as well. Swinging was really not the forte of the New Friends, although harpist Laura Newell and guitarist Tony Colucci were helpful in that regard. They are augmented on this date by Hank D'Amico, a good jazz clarinetist who nevertheless was not the equal of Buster Bailey, who appeared on some of the Victors. For the 1947 sessions, the string quartet had a new second violinist, Bernard Robbins, and a new violist, Ralph Hersh.

International called the set Sullivan's "Anniversary Album," explaining in the notes that it marked her 10 years in show business. Actually she had been singing since 1934, but only started making records in 1937. The selections were supposedly chosen by six well-known DJs and writers, whose mugs appeared on the cover. This transparent publicity ploy was common back then. Among the collaborators are Metronome magazine editor George Simon and deejay Dave Garroway. The latter was an important figure, first in radio and then on television. His relaxed, conversational approach become influential during his tenure as the first host of NBC's Today show. Garroway even lent his name to a few albums for RCA Victor, although he actually only appears on one of them.

Alan Shulman's arrangements for Sullivan are facile, and particularly show his influence on Riddle in his backing for "Mad About the Boy," which is something of a pre-echo of Riddle's Close to You arrangements for Sinatra. For those, Riddle utilized the Hollywood String Quartet along with harp, clarinet and several other instruments.

The sound on this album is more than adequate; the Victor singles are uniformly excellent. All were remastered from lossless needle drops on Internet Archive.

Debussy and Roussel with Julius Baker, Lillian and Harry Fuchs, and Laura Newell

Having recently showcased the sibling duo of Joseph and Lillian Fuchs, I thought that brother Harry might be feeling left out, so I transferred this US Decca LP that features his cello playing.

Of course, the spotlight here is not on the cello; rather it is on the splendid flute playing of Julius Baker. He is heard throughout this program, which includes Debussy's Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp (1915); his Syrinx for Unaccompanied Flute; and Roussel's Trio for Flute, Viola and Cello, Op. 40. Laura Newell is the harpist.

This a exceptionally good record with four of New York's leading mid-century virtuosi performing gorgeous French music from earlier in the century. Decca, as was its pattern in classical works, provides a close recording, although it has added some reverberation to leaven any harshness. Michael Gray's discography has Syrinx coming from February 1953 and the Sonata from July 1954. He does not provide a date for the Roussel Trio, but presumably it was from the same time frame.