48 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sensational collection, amazing sound!, July 25, 2007
This review is from: Eugene Ormandy (Audio CD)
The people who assembled this package deserve our deepest thanks for making these rare and glorious recordings available again. Furthermore, they have done wonders with the sound. The Columbia items from the late forties sound as good or better than many '50s recordings, and the RCA releases from the 30s and early forties have never sounded better. Even the Rachmaninov sounds better here than on either the Naxos or BMG editions. In short, this is an indispensable addition to the collection of anyone who loves this music.
CD 1: Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 3 (with Claudio Arrau) and 4 (with Casadesus) (both 1947)
CD 2: Mussorgsky/Cailliet: Pictures at an Exhibition (1937), Dvorak Cello Concerto (with Piatigorsky, 1946)
CD 3: Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto (with Oscar Levant, 1947) and Symphony No. 6 (1937)
CD 4: Brahms Double Concerto (with Heifetz & Feuermann, 1939), Grieg Piano Concerto (w. Rubinstein 1942), Griffes: The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan (1934)
CD 5: Rachmaninov: Piano Concertos 1 & 3 (w. Rachmaninov, 1939/40)
CD 6: Strauss: Don Quixote (with Feuermann, 1940), Sinfonia Domestica (1938)
CD 7: Bruckner: Symphony No. 7 (1935)
CD 8: Sibelius: Symphony No. 1 & Lemminkainen's Return (1940); Ravel Piano Concerto for the Left Hand (with Casadesus, 1947)
CD 9: Mahler: Symphony No. 2 (Minneapolis, 1935)
CD 10: Schoenberg: Verklaerte Nacht (Minneapolis 1934); Miakovsky Symphony No. 21 (1947); Barber Essay No. 1 (1940)
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
31 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Amazing Ormandy, June 15, 2008
This review is from: Eugene Ormandy (Audio CD)
As conductor of the Philadephia Orchestra for 50 years he made more recordings than any other conductor. He was a great accompanist. He could conduct almost any music ever written and probably came close to doing so. Here we have 10 CDs, no notes, and fair to good sound.
CD 1 contains Beethoven's 3rd and 4th piano concertos played by Claudio Arrau and Robert Casadesus (1947)Both are excellent and the Casadesus belongs on any top 5 list.
CD 2 contains the Caillet orchestration of Musssorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition which is not as thrilling as Ravel's. Dvorak's cello concerto, played by Gregor Piatigorsky, fails to compete with records made by other cellists.
CD 3 contains a solid performance of Tchaikovsky's 6h symphony recorded in 1937. Ormandy re-recorded this in better sound many years later. Then there is the piano concerto no. 1 in a wild and eccentric performance by none other than Oscar Levant.
CD 4 is a real gem. Brahms' double concerto is on fire with Heifetz on the violin and the great Emanuel Feuermann on the cello. Next comes Arthur Rubenstein with a superb performance of the Grieg piano concerto.
CD 5 contains Rachmaninov playing his first and third piano concertos. These recordings have never been out of the catalogue and never will be. They are great.
CD 6 contains music by Richard Strauss. The Sinfonia Domestica does not measure up to his other tone poems and there is not much that Ormandy can do with it. However, Don Quixote receives a magnificent performance with brilliant solo work by Feuermann on the cello.
CD 7 is devoted to Bruckner's 7th symphony. You will like it if you like Bruckner. Otherwise, proceed to the next disc.
CD 8 contains a solid performance of Sibelius' 1st symphony and the best recording I have ever heard of Ravel's piano concerto for the Left Hand with, again, Robert Casadesus (1947).
CD 9 is Mahler's 2nd symphony with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra (1935). The sound is not good but one can tell what a fine Mahler conductor Ormandy was. It is a shame that he did not record more Mahler.
CD 10 ends with Schonberg's Verklarte Nacht, Miaskovsky' 21st symphony, and Barber's Essay No l, none of which are most people's favorite works, but do attest to Ormandy's wide range as a conductor.
In summary, a great collection.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Everything you do NOT want to know about this set, January 13, 2011
This review is from: Eugene Ormandy (Audio CD)
Sure, this 10-CD set, gathering early recordings of Eugene Ormandy, from 1935 (still Ormandy's Minneapolis years) to 1949 (his early Philadelphia years), is a musical treasure trove. It is in fact the straight reissue, by Membran (a German label specialized in budget-price reissues) of a similar box released in 2000 by another German publisher, The International Music (or TIM) company, on their History label (
Ormandy: Maestro Brillante (Box Set)), part of a series devoted to the great conductors of the past (Koussevitzky, Furtwängler, Stokowski, Klemperer, Schuricht, Barbirolli, Beecham, Toscanini..), all listed and still offered on this website. It is the History box that I bought some years ago.
It reminds you of an Ormandy that you had entirely forgotten about, before he mellowed and seemed intent at revelling in the Philadelphia's sonic splendor and lushness rather than underlining the music's edges, muscles and sinew. Startlingly, this early Ormandy is the exact opposite (to make you wonder what alien could have later taken hold of his mind, and when), a conductor of unsurpassed drive and bite, that could easily be confused with his Hungarian compatriot George Szell. In the standard repertoire (Beethoven's Piano Concertos No. 3 & 4 with Arrau and Casadesus, both from 1947, Dvorak's Cello Concerto with Piatigorsky from the year before, the famous 1939 Brahms' Double Concerto with Heifetz and Feuermann - only the second recording ever of the piece, by the way, after Thibaud-Casals-Cortot conducting in 1929 -, Tchaikovsky's Piano concerto with Oscar Levant in 1949 and Symphonie Pathétique from 1936/7), this will come as a surprise to those who know Ormandy through his later years. The Brahms Double is one of the most thrilling versions ever recorded, not quite equalled in its passionate urgency by Heifetz' own 1960 remake (with Piatigorsky), despite the stupendous sonics, because of Alfred Wallenstein's less biting conducting in the first movement. Arrau's Beethoven 3rd will come as a startling shock to those who know him only through his subsequent recordings with Galliera, Haitink and Colin Davis. This can be compared only to Schnabel (in both his recordings, with Sargent in 1933 and Dobrowen in 1947, ASIN B00005K3PG and B000003XI4, sorry, I need to keep my 9 remaining authorized product links for later), Rubinstein-Toscanini (B000003EWT) or Serkin-Bernstein (B0000029XE): it is uniquely urgent in the outer movements, with muscular utterances and biting accents from the Philadelphians, powerful and even martial in the finale in a way that points to the Emperor. Arrau favors a slightly percussive touch, closer to Serkin than to Schnbael, with trills that are rather dry and don't come near the expressivity of Schnabel's, and digs deep in the keyboard in the first movement cadenza, making it sound almost like a Bach Fantasy adapted by Busoni. But his slow movements strikes a perfect balance between the flowing and the dreamy. I haven't heard Casadesus' 1959 stereo remake of Beethoven's 4th Piano Concerto with Van Beinum and the Concertgebouw (it was reissued on Sony's Casadesus edition with the same performers' 1st, B00005KKNR, and is now difficult to find at reasonable prices) but I hope he hasn't changed his interpretive options. His recording from December 22, 1947 with Ormandy is one of my favorite versions, precisely because it strays from the accepted, more pastorale and bucolic approach to the 4th. It is a performance of great dynamism in the outer movements, with a recording that lets you hear with remarkable clarity Casadesus' transparent and muscular touch. Another feature that makes this recording stand out is that Casadeusus plays what I suppose are his own cadenzas in the outer movements - not only are they interesting, but I find them quite convincing. The two Beethovens sound fine for their vintage, much better, for instance, than Testament's reissue of the contemporary Schnabel recordings.
But, other than the languid Schoenberg Transfigured Night, the same kind of urgency and muscularity imbues Ormandy's conducting of the 20th Century repertoire: the Ravel Left-hand Concerto (Casadesus 1947) and the Sibelius First (1936) are intense and outstanding performances. The Mussorgsky Pictures is interesting for featuring not Ravel's famous orchestration, but one by a Lucien Caillet.
Second, the set also reminds you that Ormandy was quite daring in his choice of repertoire, making the world or US premiere recordings of many new works - Barber's Essay No. 1 (1940), Schoenberg's Transfigured Night (1934, premiere recording of the version for string orchestra - the original version for sextet had its recording premiere in 1925), Mahler's Second Symphony (1935, second recording after Oskar Fried's in 1924). For Griffes' Pleasure Dome of Kublai Khan (1934) and Myaskovsky's 21st Symphony (1947), I'm not sure, but I suspect it must be a premiere for the former, and possibly a US premiere for the latter. For Sibelius' First Symphony, Ormandy did indeed record the US premiere, but that was with the Minneapolis Symphony in 1935, and what we get here is his remake from a year later, with Philadelphia - a performance of "impassioned drive" (as the liner notes of the Biddulph release rightly put it). Too bad History didn't include Bartok's Piano Concerto 3 with Gyorgy Sandor, a premiere recording from 1946 (that's on Pearl,
Bartók Premières). Incidentally, all the material gathered on this set can or could be found on other labels.
And precisely, here comes the hitch. In the course of writing this review, I compared History's transfers with those of other CD reissues that I happen to have in my collection (which I purchased recently, as my interest for historical recordings has considerably increased lately, either for the pairings not included on this History set, or because I was hoping for better sonics from more established labels like Biddulph, or because I had simply forgotten that I had the specific recordings already). That's when it really struck me how much the History set had been simply plundered from these other releases.
Take the Mahler 2nd, which is on Biddulph WHL032 (
Symphony 2). The two transfers run exactly at the same speed, which would be highly unlikely in the case of independent transfers from 78rmps (given the slight differences in revolving speeds between various turntables). There is, in the History CD, a kind of soft electronic high frequency that you can hear over headphones in the softer passages, and that is not in the Biddulph, which first led me to think that the two labels might have used as their source the early LP release of Ormandy's recording, DMM 4 0 260 (information from Peter Fulöp's 1995 Mahler discography). But then, the Ravel left-hand Concerto sounds so undistinguishable from the transfer on Sony's Masterwork Heritage Ravel-Casadesus set,
Complete Piano Music of Maurice Ravel (with an uncanny absence of any surface noise) that I began suspecting that History had simply pirated it. The suspicion was confirmed by certain surface clicks on Sibelius' First, that are exactly the same as on Biddulph's transfer, WHL062 (and the inclusion, like Biddulph, of Lemminkainen's Return, is another pointer,
Symphony 1 E Minor Op 39 / Berceuse Tempest Op 64). From the surface swish I can say that it was Biddulph's Barber Essay, WHL064/5, that was History's source (
Art of Eugene Ormandy - Orchestral works including: Myaskovsky: Symphony No. 21 in F sharp minor, Op. 51 / R. Strauss: Sinfonia Domestica / Mahler: Symphony No. 8 in E flat major - Part 1 (2 CDs)), not Pearl's (
Barber: Premiere Recordings). It comes as no surprise then that Miaskovsky, Griffes and Strauss' Sinfonia Domestica also sound identical with those of that Biddulph 2-CD set, a conclusion derived not only from the general ambience but also from various and unmistakable clicks and swishes. On the other hand, based on the same kind of sonic clues, it is evidently RCA's transfer that was used for their Brahms' Double Concerto (
Heifetz Collection, Volume 5 (1939-1946)) and not Biddulph's, LAB041 (
Brahms: Violin Concerto; Double Concerto). To shorten this story, I've made the same observations with Mussorgsky/Tchaikovsky (
Symphony 6 / Pictures at an Exhibition), Strauss' Don Quixote (I'm now out of authorized product links, I'll provide them in the comments section, this one is ASIN B000001ZEV), both from Biddulph, and Dvorak's Cello Concerto on Sony Masterworks Heritage (ASIN B0000029VD). I don't have the RCA Rachs (ASIN B000003FGS) and Grieg (B000003F6Y), but I think the evidence is conclusive enough.
It becomes ironic when History/Membran pirates an alleged pirate: the only other "non-78rmp" reissue of Schoenberg's Transfigured Night was by Dante Lys, in 1996, which I don't have (ASIN B00000G4MH), but Wayne Shoaf's Schoenberg discography (available on-line) shows that the timings of both releases are identical, not only overall but section by section, which does hint to direct borrowing. This leads me to suspect that it was also Dante's release of the 1935 Minneapolis Bruckner 7th that was History/Membran's source (ASIN B00000G1H2), although I don't have the Dante for confirmation, and same with the two Beethoven concertos: B00000HZF6 and B000026CK3 (the...
Read more ›
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
