Nikolai Sokoloff Conducts

Three music directors preceded George Szell to the Cleveland Orchestra podium. Two - Artur Rodziński and Erich Leinsdorf - have been represented here, but founding music director Nikolai Sokoloff has not. He is something of a forgotten figure, but the aural evidence is that he was a very good musician who quickly built the orchestra into a polished ensemble.

Today's program includes several of the recordings he made in Cleveland in 1924-28, along with one of the two LPs he produced with his La Jolla orchestra early in the 1950s.

Sokoloff in Cleveland

Sokoloff (1886-1965) was born in Kiev but resident in the US from his early teens. He studied at Yale and with Charles Martin Loeffler and Vincent d'Indy. In 1917, he was conducting San Francisco People’s Philharmonic Orchestra when Cleveland's Adella Prentiss Hughes came to call. Not long after, he became the founding director of the Cleveland Orchestra. Its first concert was in late 1918.

Nikolai Sokoloff and Adella Prentiss Hughes with an early example of a favorite publicity pose: "admiring the new record," in this case the 1812 Overture

It wasn't long before Brunswick records signed the orchestra. Its first effort - and the first recording in our set - was an abridged acoustic version of the "1812 Overture," made in New York in January 1924. It's a credible performance and well recorded for the time. Even then Sokoloff had developed a reputation for emotional performances, but this one is restrained, without the cannon blasts or other embellishments that have found their way onto later records. The orchestra is already a disciplined ensemble, as best as one can tell from the acoustic recording and altered instrumentation.

1926 ad

This impression is borne out by out next record - the Act III Prelude and Bridal Chorus from Wagner's Lohengrin. By this time (May 1926), Brunswick had moved on to electrical recording. It had, however, adopted the so-called GE "Light-Ray" method, which was inferior to the Western Electric process used by other companies. Mark Obert-Thorn, who has produced an edition of all Sokoloff's Cleveland recordings, wrote of the GE system, "At lower volume levels, the results could be acceptable; however, anything forte and above came out congested and harshly distorted." Actually, the sound on the Wagner discs is not nearly as bad as this might suggest, although inferior to other recordings of the time.

Also from these May 1926 sessions came Halvorsen's "Entry March of the Boyars." The sessions were held in the still-existing Masonic Auditorium, the orchestra's usual site in those pre-Severance Hall days. It was a good place for recording, also used by Decca-London for its Cleveland recordings during the Lorin Maazel years.

Masonic Auditorium

In November 1926, the orchestra became a pioneer in radio broadcasting with the first in a series of programs transmitted by Cleveland station WTAM and sponsored by the Medusa Cement Corp., both still in existence. While the broadcast is lost to time, I've included its program in the download.

Sokoloff's final Brunswick session, held in New York on May 8, 1928, was devoted to Sibelius' "Valse Triste" and the "Polovtsian Dances" from Borodin's Prince Igor. The Sibelius and one of the two Borodin discs are in the download.

Sokoloff's downfall in Cleveland was rooted both in music and manners. This selection of recordings demonstrate that he was a talented conductor and orchestra builder. He was, however, most inclined to the Romantic and contemporary composers. The latter put off the paying customers; his indulgent approach to the classicists and even Romantics tested the patience of some critics.

Meanwhile, relations with at least some members of the orchestra were strained. The download includes an 1926 Associated Press article reporting on an orchestra petition "charging Sokoloff with conduct unbecoming a gentleman." Such conduct apparently involved insulting the abilities and intelligence of some of the musicians. For his part, Sokoloff blandly observed, "The artists' contracts say they must do as I tell them."

These dust-ups apparently continued until the orchestra trustees didn't renew his contract in 1933.

Sokoloff's achievements in Cleveland are undeniable, however. Obert-Thorn has written that, "What we hear on these recordings is an ensemble that already sounds superior to most of its European counterparts at the time, save perhaps for Mengelberg’s Concertgebouw Orchestra." That is remarkable for an orchestra founded less than a decade before.

The download includes label scans and other ephemera, plus Obert-Thorn's discography of Sokoloff's recordings with the ensemble. 

Most of these recordings were remastered from lossless originals on Internet Archive, some of which have noisy surfaces. The 1812 Overture comes from a 1970s Cleveland Orchestra promotional LP.

You can find all Sokoloff's Brunswicks in Obert-Thorn's transfers on the Pristine Classical site. They include the first recording of Rachmaninoff's Symphony No. 2.

Editorial cartoon, circa 1926

New Music in La Jolla

Perhaps strangely, Sokoloff's next post after Cleveland was as the director of the New Deal's Federal Music Project. He then led the Seattle Symphony for a few years, and finally founded the Orchestra of the Musical Arts Society of La Jolla, in Southern California. There, he made his final recordings, for the small Alco company, of contemporary pieces by Norman Dello Joio, Benjamin Britten and Bohuslav Martinů.

Alice Mock in 1927

I've included his Britten-Martinů disc, recorded in 1950. The Martinů work is his delightful "Sinfonietta La Jolla," written for the ensemble and beautifully performed by its members. The Britten work is his settings of Rimbaud called "Les Illuminations." Here the work is sung by the little known but excellent Alice Mock, with sensitive backing by Sokoloff's orchestra. This may have been the first recording of the Britten.

Alco's recording quality is vivid, except for some strange balances and a cramped quality, both likely the fault of a too-small studio. The download includes complete scans and reviews from the New York Times, Saturday Review, High Fidelity, the American Record Guide and The New Records. I've also included texts and translations of the Rimbaud poetry.