Stravinsky Conducts His Mass

Stravinsky made most of his recordings for Columbia, with the exception of one made for Telefunken in the 1930s, several albums made for RCA in the 1940s, one Vox and one Mercury LP. This post by request starts a short series of Stravinsky's own non-Columbia recordings. It is a 1949 recording of his Mass issued on an early 10-inch RCA LP.

The performers are men and boys from New York's Church of the Blessed Sacrament, along with a wind ensemble.

Stravinsky's avowed purpose in this mass was to provide music that avoids operatic gestures and speaks to the spirit. The performance, however, is a bit anonymous and stylistically typical of its time. The recording is indifferent.

I'll be back with another RCA LP and the 1938 Telefunken recording with the Berlin Philharmonic, as reissued on Capitol.

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Alexander the Great

One of the great covers - Richard Burton in blue diapers and a blond wig (seemingly the same one that Barbara Stanwyck wore in Double Indemnity), contemplating world domination as Claire Bloom looks on admiringly.

What is it about Alexander the Great that makes actors want to adopt elaborate blond hairdos? Colin Farrell came up with a similar look for his turn as the coiffed conqueror in recent years, and hasn't been heard from since. Burton was more lucky, going on to some renown and even infamy as actor and lover both.

I've posted this not to make fun of Burton's look (although I have enjoyed doing that), but because the music was requested and I am pleased to oblige. Back in the vinyl-only days, this was quite a rare record (and I suppose still is). I believe it may have been the first Mario Nascimbene score to be issued on LP (it came out in 1956), and of course he went on to a long and productive career.

The music here is as you might expect from a sword-and-sandal epic, brass fanfares and martial drums interspersed with reflective flute and guitar items. Not really my thing, although I must have liked it at some point because it is, after all, from my collection!

This is a more or less mint copy (except for some odd noises). The sound is bright and a little fuzzy, sort of like Burton's wig.

Dancing with George Siravo

Returning to our series of postwar dance bands, here is another "dance date" as presented by Columbia in 1950. This one features George Siravo, who didn't have a road band but who was making a name for himself as an arranger for the finest singers, including Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, Buddy Clark and later Tony Bennett.

Siravo has achieved some latter-day acclaim for his instrumental LPs as well, although this one (his first) is relatively unknown, but very worthwhile. As this album's excellent anonymous notes point out, his "firm, catchy beat" is in evidence throughout the set.

Siravo was doing quite a bit of work for Sinatra around this time, and his tune Barbecue Riffs on this LP later turned up on a Sinatra session as Farewell, Farewell to Love. Siravo didn't, however, do the arrangement for Frank; Ray Conniff did.

As with the Hal McIntyre record below, Columbia touted this album as presenting continuous music (in the process creating its own variant spelling for "medleys"). On the McIntyre set, the songs were linked by brief celeste interludes. Here Columbia just clomps them together.

Cowboy Hit Parade

I must admit that I chose this album primarily for its spectacular cover, with a facsimile of an iconic Wurlitzer 1015 jukebox, cowboy trio, Western scene, and jukebox strips listing the contents.

It is indeed a "cowboy hit parade," with some of the big hits of the late 1940s, the difference being that they are not presented by the original hit artists but by the ones who occupied stalls in Capitol's stables.

The back cover (below) suggests that the Capitol artists each picked a tune they wished had been a hit for them for inclusion in this album. I suspect the reality was a little different - at the time, the practice was to for record companies to hustle out cover versions of any song that looked like it might be a hit for a competitor. These were probably cover versions that didn't sell well.

Nonetheless the contents are enjoyable, with Merle Travis and Tex Williams in especially good form. The only dog on the record is Old Shep. Pardon the pun, but I do hate this tune. Ironically two of the songs here were hits for artists who appear elsewhere on the record. Jack Guthrie had a hit with Oklahoma Hills and Tex Williams had a giant success with Shame on You when he was Spade Cooley's vocalist.

By the way, this album is a box of four 45-rpm singles. This was one of the many packaging variations that came along following the 1948 microgroove revolution. The same contents were likely also available in a 78 album and possibly as a 10-inch LP.

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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.

Dick Haymes - Sweethearts

Dick Haymes has long been one of my favorite singers. While a collection or two of his recordings are usually available, these packages tend to be recycle the same items over and over.

I have a relatively large collection of Haymes on 78 and some day when I get a lot more time and energy, I will transfer some of the many items that have never been rereleased. Until then, I'll present his 10-inch LPs now and again.

This one is from 1951 and in common with the majority of his Decca LPs collects a bunch of singles, all very well done, including gorgeous renditions of Stella By Starlight and Laura. He is accompanied by Victor Young or Gordon Jenkins on most of these titles.

Hanson's Piano Concerto with Firkušný

Howard Hanson made a long series of recordings of music by himself and other American composers for the Mercury label in the 1950s. The stereo recordings are fairly well known, mostly for their supposed audiophile qualities; the mono recordings less so.

I recently featured one of those early mono Mercurys, and the response was good. So I'll be revisiting some of the other LPs in Mercury's Modern American Music Series soon.

But first, one of the few recordings that Hanson and the Eastman-Rochester Orchestra made for Columbia, this one issued in 1951. The main item of interest is the conductor's piano concerto in its first recording, with soloist Rudolf Firkušný, who introduced the work with Hanson and the Boston Symphony in late 1948.

After an opening reminiscent of Hanson's second symphony, we quickly are off into territory that is more like Prokofiev, and none the worse for that, particularly with Firkušný in excellent form.

Hanson's Mercury recordings were all-American, but here he backs up his own music with that of Grieg -not the most vibrant Holberg Suite in my experience. I suppose the connection is Nordic (as the cover suggests). These recordings have not been reissued, to my knowledge.

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