Digression No. 19

When I got into the blogging game, I had no idea that it would lead to such wondrous occurrences as having a post of a Bobby Breen LP dedicated to me. But that has now come to pass over at the the Capt's Christmas Yuleblog, one of the web's main purveyors of musical holiday cheer.

Breen is the fellow on the left in the photo above - he made a living as a juvenile crooner and film star during the 30s. He is duetting here with Ned Sparks, a true hero of the early talkies and a fellow whose dyspeptic screen personality is closer to my real personality than is that of Bobby Breen, whose very name sounds sunny and radiant.

The Capt came by his interest in Breen through hearing him mentioned in Ernie Kovacs routines. Those of us of a certain age can tell you that Breen was kind of a stock reference point for comics like Kovacs during the 50s. Hearing Breen's name got the Capt interested in him, eventually led to him acquiring Breen's Christmas LP, and then dedicating the post to me because said record is of the 10-inch variety.

To the Capt, I say thanks for the kind words, and to all of the readers of this blog, I say head on over to the Christmas Yuleblog for Bobby Breen and many other Christmas goodies, including Dragnet - The Christmas Story, one of my all-time favorites.

Christmas in Berlin, 1955

Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft and its pop label, Polydor, produced many fine Christmas records during the 1950s, including this collection from 1955.

The artists are Willy Schneider (a popular baritone), the Berlin Motet Choir, Erich Bender and his children's choir, strings and organ, and the results they produce fully live up to the title on the cover, which means "the glow of Christmas candles."

It could be that this cover was also used for other Christmas records because the catalog number, artists' names and repertoire are on stickers. On the record itself the title is given as "The Songs and Sounds of Christmas Time." Well, whatever its provenance and packaging, the music and performances are appealing and very well recorded.

REMASTERED VERSION - DECEMBER 2014

Sargent, Royal Choral Society at Christmas

Malcolm Sargent, the most famous British choral trainer of the 20th century, was the conductor of the Royal Choral Society for nearly 40 years. Together they produced this collection of carols for release during 1954.

The garish cover may give you the impression that this is a small choir recorded in a parish church. Not at all - it actually is a very large chorus and the recording location was probably the Albert Hall, which the chorus called home - at least it sounds like that cavernous site. The recessed recording gives a very good sense of how the chorus sounded in person, at the loss of some detail and presence.

Many of the arrangements here are by Sargent; my favorite, however, is the soaring version of the hymn While Shepherds Watched.

In the download I've included HMV's four-page Christmas advertising insert from the December 1955 Gramophone Record Review - page three (with this LP) is below.

REMASTERED VERSION - DECEMBER 2014

Christmas with the Weavers

This is one of my favorite Christmas albums. There is joy and optimism in the Weavers' presentation of these songs, and their approach manages to sound both plain-spoken and sophisticated at once. All these songs (with the possible exception of the inescapable and seemingly endless Twelve Days of Christmas) have a freshness that is rare in the genre.

This 1951 LP was issued towards the end of the Weavers' first period of popularity, which ended in the McCarthy era due to their leftist politics. They were perhaps the first folk group to achieve broad appeal, one of a number of blues and folk acts who began appearing in New York clubs in the 1940s. We have already encountered Josh White on this blog; Leadbelly was another. The Weavers were brought to Decca by Gordon Jenkins (who has made several appearances here himself). Completing the circle, the Weavers' biggest hit was Leadbelly's Goodnight Irene, with backing by Jenkins - a song that has since been recorded by everyone from Mitch Miller to the Meat Puppets.

My copy of the original Weavers LP has some damage. The title song is unplayable, so I have patched in a reissue of that item. As is common these days, the reissue was both heavily compressed and re-equalized to have a strong upper mid-range emphasis. I corrected the latter, but the former can't be changed. It results in the singers sounding distinctly closer to the microphone on that tune than on the other songs. There also is a bit of damage on the second song, and a little noise elsewhere. But the basic sound is quite good.

At the time of the group's Decca recordings, its members were Pete Seeger, Ronnie Gilbert, Fred Hellerman and Lee Hays. I plan to feature one of Seeger's Folkways LPs here in the future; perhaps also a Ronnie Gilbert album.

Ferrante and Teicher - New Transfer and Scans

I first shared this 1954 Ferrante and Teicher 10-inch LP last year, even though I was dubious about its merits, commenting, "The musical results are interesting if a bit relentless, witty but also kind of tacky. Not really my thing, but the pianists and woodland creatures seem to be enjoying themselves. Perhaps you will, too."

There is no doubt that many of you did enjoy yourselves, despite my reservations. It was far and away the most popular item I have ever featured here. Therefore I am bowing to the tastes of readers here and bringing Art and Lou back for an encore, in a new, improved version.

Yes, friends, this is a new transfer in FLAC format, and new scans, including the back cover for the first time (below)! However, my opinion of the music remains exactly the same, proving that neither the holiday season nor the passage of time have improved my disposition.

There's more about the LP at the original post.

Boult Conducts and Rehearses Britten

A break from the Christmas tunes - here we have some of Benjamin Britten's finest music in both performances and rehearsal by Sir Adrian Boult and the London Philharmonic.

The recordings were made in late 1956 by the American company Westminster in conjunction with the British Pye-Nixa. Included were the Four Sea Interludes and Passacaglia from Britten's Peter Grimes and his Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (a set of variations and fugue on a theme by Henry Purcell).

The latter was written for a 1946 educational film that was conducted and narrated by the urbane Malcolm Sargent (there's an excerpt on YouTube).

Westminster issued the Boult-LPO Young Person's Guide in two versions - with narration and without, and then for good measure added a rehearsal recording. I've gathered all these versions together for this post. In brief, we have the unnarrated Guide and Peter Grimes music in stereo (cover above) and the narrated Guide and rehearsal in mono (cover below).

The transition from mono to stereo recording provided some interesting experiments in recording, illustrated to a degree by the rehearsal recording. As producer Kurt List says in the liner notes, the seating arrangement used for his recordings "never coincides with concert seating; thus quite a different span of attention is required of the conductor and the orchestral musicians." List's practice was to spread the orchestra out and use multiple microphones, and then fix the balances in the control room. He then has the conductor do a run through and asks him to adjust the balances further. The rehearsal recording on this disk is in fact a session where List asks Boult to change balances for recording purposes.

The irony of asking a conductor who was noted for stressing clarity and balance to rebalance the music because you have exploded the usual seating arrangement and put microphones all over the hall apparently doesn't occur to List. But to be fair, the results are not bad, if not to my own taste, in both mono and stereo.

The Young Person's Guide is nicely done, even if Boult doesn't capture Britten's mock pomposity very well. The fugue is predictably wonderful. The Peter Grimes music is also beautifully rendered, and if the struggles seem external more than internal, that also may demonstrate the difference in temperament between conductor and composer.

As a bonus to this post, I've added a recording of the original Purcell theme (a rondeau from his Abdelazer theatre music) in a performance by the Bath Festival Orchestra and Yehudi Menuhin.

A Musical Version of Junior Miss

In recent weeks, we have been exploring some of the remarkable programming that was presented on US commercial television in the late 1950s, including an original Cole Porter musical, Aladdin. The sponsor of the Porter production was DuPont, which only a few months earlier had mounted yet another original musical from a famous composer, Burton Lane, and lyricist, Dorothy Fields.

Unlike the score for Aladdin, which is still remembered today, Lane's music for Junior Miss is largely forgotten, as is the program that evoked it. Perhaps even more surprising, the Junior Miss stories themselves are no longer remembered.

Those Sally Benson stories, originally published in the New Yorker, were collected into book form in 1941, and then became a play, film and radio show - and finally this televised musical. Set at Christmas in New York, the superb 1945 film once made occasional appearances on television but hasn't been seen lately (at least by me). Its disappearance is very strange - the film is both delightful and touching, with wonderful performances by Peggy Ann Garner in the title role and Allyn Joslyn as her father.

The TV musical featured Carol Lynley as Judy Graves, our protagonist, and Don Ameche as her father. Unlike other more famous TV musicals, such as Aladdin and Cinderella, there was no soundtrack recording to keep its memory alive - only this EP of performances by Columbia artists Vic Damone, Jo Stafford and Norman Luboff. I would have to assume this was issued in advance of the program, which aired on December 20, 1957. (This site says there is a poor quality bootleg of the performances by the TV cast, but I have never encountered it.)

The performances on the EP are as good as you would expect, and the recording as hollow as you might expect if you are familiar with Columbia's 50s pop output. The songs themselves are quite enjoyable, even if the lyrics of "Junior Miss" are reminiscent of "Gigi" and if "I'll Buy It" brings to mind "I'll Buy That Dream." "Let's Make It Christmas All Year 'Round" also is not the most original concept.

It's fascinating to look through the listings for the DuPont Show of the Month in 1957-58. As I mentioned, Junior Miss came just two months before Aladdin. And two months after the latter show, DuPont and CBS mounted a version of The Red Mill with the following cast: Shirley Jones, Harpo Marx, Elaine May, Mike Nichols, Donald O'Connor, Elaine Stritch, Evelyn Rudie and Edward Andrews. It was a different time.

LINK to December 2025 remaster