More Mozart from Shumsky, Plus the Haffner Symphony with Wallenstein

Following up on my recent post of violinist Oscar Shumsky in Mozart sonatas, here is his circa 1956 reading of the Violin Concerto No. 5 in A major, K. 219. It is coupled with a fleet performance of the Symphony No. 35 in D major, K. 385, from Alfred Wallenstein and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

The LA forces play strikingly well under the baton of Wallenstein, who was completing his 13 years as LAPO maestro when this record was issued in 1956. Shumsky is backed by the New York-based Little Orchestra, which does not display the same discipline as the West Coast musicians. Thomas Scherman is the conductor in the concerto.

Oscar Shumsky

As always, Shumsky is perfectly in control - perhaps even a little too much so in the finale's quasi-Turkish music, which benefits from some abandon. The sound is good throughout.

These recordings come to us from Music-Appreciation Records, which had been started a few years previously as a mail-order subscription effort by the Book-of-the-Month Club. As with the similar efforts before and later, the pitch was getting cultured. In one widely-placed ad, publisher and TV personality Bennett Cerf exclaimed, "In a few minutes Music-Appreciation Records taught me more about Beethoven's Fifth Symphony than I learned in a month in a course in college!"

Many of the Music-Appreciation records contained both a performance of the work and an audio analysis; sometimes they came on separate discs. My own collection has both orphaned performances and analyses with no performance. This particular record did not have an recorded analysis; at least I don't have it. There are notes on the back cover by Deems Taylor, but of course this is not any different from most classical recordings then and now.

Wallenstein himself appears in some of the Music-Appreciation ads, providing a not-entirely-disinterested rave (see below).

Mozart Concertos from Rosina Lhévinne

I thought I might follow up the Ania Dorfmann and Maryla Jonas posts with a selection of the recordings of another lesser-known woman pianist, Rosina Lhévinne.

Lhévinne made very few appearances in the recording studio and was principally known in her lifetime for being a noted piano teacher, with pupils including Van Cliburn and John Browning, as well as for being the wife of pianist Josef Lhévinne. The few items that were captured, however, show her to be a first-rate artist.

Rosina Bessie was a promising piano student in Moscow when she met Josef Lhévinne, marrying him soon after her 1898 graduation from the Conservatory, and quickly abandoning any career as a solo performer, although she did engage in duo-piano works with Josef. The pair came to the US following the World War, and they joined the Juilliard faculty several years later. Josef died in 1944.

The Lhévinnes only made two recordings together, to my knowledge – Debussy’s “Fêtes” and a Mozart sonata, both in the 1930s.

Today’s LPs include the first record that Rosina made following Josef’s death, a November 1947 rendition of Mozart’s Concerto for Three Pianos K.242, where she is joined by the duo-pianists Vitya Vronsky and Victor Babin, and accompanied by the Little Orchestra Society and conductor Thomas Scherman, in a recording from Liederkranz Hall. The transfer is from an early Columbia LP that also includes Vronsky and Babin in a showy version of Mozart’s Concerto for Two Pianos K.365 with the Robin Hood Dell Orchestra and Dimitri Mitropoulos. The latter dates from September 1945. The sound on both is good. Strangely, Columbia bills Rosina Lhévinne only as “Lhévinne” on the LP cover.

Jean Morel

Rosina is heard to best advantage, however, in today’s second album, recorded in May 1960 to mark her 80th birthday. This is a superior account of Mozart’s Concerto No. 21 in which she sounds just as youthful as the students in the accompanying Juilliard Orchestra (I suspect the ensemble also included faculty), led by Jean Morel, another famed teacher. (Vronsky and Babin also were instructors, and were on the Cleveland Institute of Music faculty for many years – Babin was the director of the school.) The sound from Columbia’s 30th Street Studio is as vibrant as the artistry. That is Josef Lhévinne’s portrait over Rosina’s shoulder on the LP cover up top.

I also have the Lhévinnes’ version of “Fêtes” and Rosina’s 1961 Chopin Concerto No. 1 if there is interest.

Thomas Scherman Conducts Copland and Thomson

Four years ago a post on this blog presented an American Decca recording of film music by Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson from the Little Orchestra Society and Thomas Scherman. Here is a companion post with more music by the same composers and the same performers, also from 1952.

Scherman

This time around we have a 10-inch LP with music from Copland's score for the film Our Town, and a suite from Thomson's music for The Plow That Broke the Plains.

Scherman was not terribly well regarded as a conductor during his lifetime (Ned Rorem tells the story of walking out on a Scherman performance of Rorem's own music), but in my view these are accomplished performances of most affecting music, beautifully recorded. The Decca pressings are not very good, but hopefully not too distracting.

Copland and Thomson

This is a follow-up to my earlier post containing Virgil Thomson's music written for the film Louisiana Story, which came out in 1948. There are two suites pulled from this music - the one heard on the earlier post by the Philadelphia Orchestra under the composer's direction, and this one, called Acadian Songs and Dances, which contains music that Thomson derived from published folk collections.

In this performance, the Thomson is coupled with film music written by Aaron Copland, the Children's Suite from The Red Pony, from 1949.

Both suites were relatively new when this recording from the Little Orchestra Society and Thomas Scherman was issued in 1952. With the films' similarities in theme, setting and time, and the connection between the two composers, the two works make highly complementary companions on disc.

The performances from the New York-based ensemble are very fine, and the simple recording is excellent. It is a good example of what used to be called "hole in the wall" recording - that is, the recording is so coherent that it gives the impression of taking place behind the speaker. That's an effect I like, but the "hi-fi" crowd wanted things to be more close up, so the microphones got closer and more numerous and by the end of the decade multi-miked ping-pong stereo was in vogue.

The music here is simple, yet sophisticated in its own way, and the performance is highly sympathetic. This is another one of my favorite recordings, so I hope you enjoy it.