First Recordings of Roy Harris

I so much enjoyed the previous post of Roy Harris' music that I wanted to follow it with this LP of two premiere recordings of his symphonies. It couples a then-new recording of Harris' seventh symphony with a reissue of the composer's Symphony 1933.

Performing the seventh symphony is the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy, who conducted the first performances. The sessions were in October 1955 in the Academy of Music.

The Symphony 1933 (which is sometimes called Harris' first) was a Boston Symphony performance under Serge Koussevitzky, who commissioned the work. This was a February 1934 recording in Carnegie Hall, made shortly after the first performance.

Both works display the muscular approach that Harris brought to his symphonies. The Philadelphia performance manages to sound refined, nonetheless, and the sound is well balanced without being especially vivid. In transferring the earlier work, Columbia has troweled on the reverb (as customary). This has the effect of making the timpani in the first movement sound strangely prominent and makes the atmosphere woolly. The earlier performance must have been all that Harris could have hoped for, although in truth the orchestra sounds a little uncomfortable with the meter changes in the Allegro.

The 1934 recording was thought to be the first recording of an American symphony when this LP came out, but I am not sure if this is still considered to be the case.

LINK - new remastered in ambient stereo, March 2025

Copland by Koussevitzky

This post is in response to a request by friend of the blog David Federman. David says he has never heard a version of Copland's Appalachian Spring to rival the first recording, by the Boston Symphony and Serge Koussevitzky. So here is that mid-40s recording for David, and I imagine many others, in a mid-50s transfer on RCA - and a pretty good one, too.

This also includes Koussevitzky's 1938 first recording of El Salón México, also sounding well, if enshrouded in reverb.

This pressing of Appalachian Spring had a fault toward the end of the side, so I patched in a short section from a much later Victrola pressing, which almost certainly used the same tape transfer for its master.

The latter album also included the BSO/Koussevitzky version of A Lincoln Portrait, with narrator Melvyn Douglas, so I have added that to the download as a bonus. Here the sound is a little cloudier and there is more pitch instability, possibly caused by making a new disk master from an old and creaky tape transfer. I am not that fond of Douglas' histrionic approach to Lincoln. Copland's words tell us that Lincoln was "a quiet and a melancholy man," but Douglas seems to disagree. Give me Charlton Heston with Abravanel, a more monumental approach that is well suited to the stylized (and much criticized) narrative and to Copland's music.

UPDATE - This has been remastered and the Appalachian Spring is a new transfer.

Unre-released Charles Munch, Part 2

There was a great deal of interest in the last post of unre-released Boston Symphony/Charles Munch material. So here is another one - this time Schubert's second symphony. As with the Schumann, his orchestra/conductor combo later recorded the same music in stereo, which may account for this 1949 version remaining in the vaults since its first issue.

This early rendition was issued both on a 10-inch LP and on this 12-inch LP, where it was paired with the Schubert 8th, again by the Boston orchestra, this time conducted by Munch's predecessor as BSO music director, Serge Koussevitzky.

I can't confess any special affinity for Schubert's symphonies, but these versions are as well played as you might expect given the participants.

The last post in this series elicited a lengthy discussion about whether it was issued at the right pitch. I think this one is pitched correctly.