Stuyvesnat Quartet: Brahms & Mozart -- Audio Treasures

Stuyvesant Quartet with Alfred Gallodoro, clarinet
Brahms/Mozart
Bridge

The Stuyvesant Quartet was a group of talented musicians who left a remarkable legacy. Founded by by the Shulman brothers, Sylvan (violin) and Alan (cello) in 1938, the quartet consisted of preeminent musicians from broadcast network symphony orchestras. In 1950 they formed their own label -- Philharmonia -- with audio legend Norman Pickering as their recording engineer.

Although Philharmonia was short-lived, the recordings and performances were top-notch, as this current reissue attests. The sound is warm, but detailed. The ensemble is nicely balanced, with a natural-sounding blend. And the performances are very much of their time.

The Brahms Clarinet Quintet with clarinetist Alfred Gallodoro is given a heavily romantic and sometimes sweet, reading. It's a performance that's full of drama, yet there are passages where the ensemble seems to be simply savoring every note.

The Stuyvensant's performances of Mozart's String Quartet in D major, K. 499 and String Quartet in D major, K. 575 are more straight-forward. While there is more vibrato than you'd hear in a modern recording, the ensemble keeps things simple and uncluttered.

This reissue is a window into the past, and a valuable one. No modern quartet would perform these works in the manner of the Stuyvesant. Yet the high degree of musicianship and the emotional charge they give these works makes for compelling listening even today. And the Stuyvesant's interpretations yield insights that can still sound fresh to modern ears.

Listening to Richter

Sviatoslav Richter (1915-1997) is widely recognized as one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century. He was well known for the depth of his interpretations, virtuoso technique, extensive repertoire, and aversion to the recording studio.

He is one of the few great solo artists who was not a child prodigy, beginning formal studies at the Moscow Conservatory with Heinrich Neuhaus when he was 22. During Richter's audition for Neuhaus, the teacher apparently whispered to a fellow student 'this man's a genius'. Although Neuhaus taught many great pianists, including Emil Gilels and Radu Lupu, it is said that he considered Richter to be 'the genius pupil' for whom he had been waiting all his life.

While Richter enjoyed performing, his evaluation of his own performances was uncompromising. He played small venues throughout the Soviet Union, and he was known to repeat the entire program after the concert in an empty hall if he was unsatisfied with the performance.

He refused to record in the studio, arguing that each performance was whole, complete, and unique. His style was unabashedly romantic, and sometimes his experiments worked, and sometimes they did not. Richter's playing, at its best which was most of the time, was transcendental.



Richter's repertoire was vast, ranging from Handel and Bach to Szymanowski, Berg, Webern, Stravinsky, Bartók, Hindemith, Britten, and Gershwin. His memoirs, recounted to the film maker Bruno Monsaingeon and published by Princeton as Sviatoslav Richter: Notebooks and Conversations, make for fascinating reading. His comments on his contemporaries, sometimes judiciously edited by Monsaingeon, are both tart and insightful. His tale of the bizarre funeral of Joseph Stalin, at which he and other Soviet artists were commanded to perform, is almost surreal.

Richter was a genius. He saw the performer's role as trying to realize the composer's intentions as accurately and as fully as it was possible for him to do so. But that does not get to the core of his art, since he was guided by his own unique inspiration. He had no technical limitations, and he played only what he thought was worthy of his attention. If he could not get at the musical essence of a work, he would not play it publicly.

He brought a delicacy and warmth to the music of Schumann and Schubert that tempered his sometimes tempestuous passion. His Prokofiev is the stuff of legend. His collaborations with his admired colleague, the violinist David Oistrakh, are unique. Fortunately, Richter's recorded legacy is almost as vast as his repertoire.

Many of us at WTJU admire Richter's art and play his recordings. You can access archived shows for two weeks at the WTJU Show Archive.

Original and rare recordings of Kurt Weill, 1928-1944

Kurt Weill 
Die Dreigroschenoper 
Historic Original Recordings 1928-1944 
Capriccio 

The first disc of this 2-CD collection is mostly music from the Threepenny Opera, including the original cast (1928-31) and select foreign song recordings from 1930-31. While this music by Kurt Weill and Berthold Brecht has received many performances, there has been a subtle shift in interpretation over time.

These recordings document how these songs were first performed, with the brashness and exuberance of early jazz. Listening to the original cast of Die Dreigoschenoper (Harald Paulsen, Carola, Neher, Kurt Garron, and Lotte Lenya) is a revelation. There’s a subversive undercurrent in these singers’ delivery that’s missing in modern performances.

The collection includes not only the original cast, but also the first Dutch recordings of Weill’s music, along with some dance band covers of the day. Also included are 1929 recordings by the Berlin State Opera Orchestra with Otto Klemperer of the Threepenny Opera concert suite.

Disc 2 features a variety of historic and exceedingly rare recordings from 1928-1944. It includes music from Happy End, a unsuccessful comedy. The songs by Brecht and Weill from that ill-fated production were recorded in 1929, but seldom heard since.

“Six Songs” is a transcription of a box set released in 1943. These American releases feature Lotte Lenya (her voice already starting to darken) with Weill’s piano arrangements made specifically for the recordings. The collection ends with two anti-Nazi political songs Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht wrote for the Office of War during the Second World War. These were broadcast into Germany via shortwave in 1942 and 1944 sung (of course) by Lotte Lenya.

For the most part, the transfers are very good. Surface noise is minimal, and the sound isn’t over-processed. These are mono recordings, and there’s some compression, but not more than what one would expect from shellac discs almost a century old. I found this a fascinating collection of music, and one that provides historical context to Kurt Weill’s compositions.