Phonograph Monthly Review, Vol. 2, No. 11 (1928-08)

August, 1928 The Phonograph Monthly Review 893 In the next group, the conductors all are prom- inent and have considerable repertories, but their works do not cover as extensive a range as those of the men above. (Here, as before, there is no significance to the order in which they are listed.) Richard Strauss Polydor-Brunswick; H.M.V.; Columbia Thomas Beecham Columbia Bruno Walter Polydor; Columbia Max von Schillings Polydor Felix Weingartner ...Columbia Siegfried Wagner Parlophone-Odeon; Columbia; H.M.V. Otto Klemperer Polydor Arturo Toscanini Victor; Brunswick Phillippe Gaubert Columbia Piero Coppola French H.M.V. Karl Muck Columbia; H.M.V.-Victor Stanley Chappie Vocalion Hermann Abendroth Polydor; H.M.V. Alfred Herz Victor Next a group of men with fewer works and a still less extensive range: Stock (Victor); Damrosch (Columbia); Barbirolli (NGS); Greenbaum (Vocalion); Klenau (Columbia); Schneevoight (Columbia); Sargent (HMV); Cloez (Odeon ); Rhene-Baton (French HMV); Stransky (Columbia); Sokoloff (Brunswick); Verbrugghen (Brunswick); Ruhlmann (Pathe); Goossens Sr. (Edison-Bell); Szell (Parlophone); Viebig (Polydor); God- frey (Columbia); Pasternack (Victor); Prince (Columbia); Bourdon (Victor); Pitt (HMV; Columbia); and a long group of Polydor conductors: Busch, Kuper, Wohllebe, Seidler- Winkler, Knappertsbusch, Pfitzner, Heidenreich, Fock, Mari- enhagen, Hausegger, etc. “Salon” conductors like Shilkret, Dajos Bela, Lorand, Katzman, Mendoza, etc., also deserve mention here. Then a group of composers, recording princi- pally their own works: Strauss, of course, then Elgar, Holst, Vaughn-Williams, German, Stan- ford, Herbert, Bliss, Schreker, Mascagni, Smyth, Mackenzie, etc. And finally men known by one or two record- ings only (although in several cases these are ex- tremely significant.) This list also includes sev- eral new conductors from whom much may be heard in the future. Nikisch, Shavitch, Casals, Henschel, Ganz, von Hoesslin, Collingwood, Toye, Defosse, Defauw, True, Heger, Bendito, Hoeberg, Schnedler-Petersen, Hadley, Weyserberg, Papi, etc., etc. (There are many omissions in the above lists, of course, and in several instances the grouping is open to easy dispute, but they are given merely for convenience and not with any object of actually classifying the various conductors ac- cording to their merits or significance.) Stokowski and the Problem of Virtuosity One of the most important types of conductor, even more influential in recordings than in the concert hall, is that of the “virtuoso”, a term which has a convenient if bewildering elasticity of interpretation, but which I shall try to use in the strictest sense of “one excelling in technic,” a musician of uncommon assurance, personality, and expressive powers,—both of his own talents and those of his orchestra, the latter a band of musicians of the first rank whom he has trained to a high degree of perfection and also to com- pete responsiveness to his will. The term “virtu- oso” should not imply anything more, and the in- disputable fact that many virtuosos possess ar- tistic gifts far inferior to their technical ones, or are especially prone to sin against the canons of good taste and musical purism, must not preju- dice us into condemning them all because of their virtuosity alone. We may—and had better—sus- pect them, but it would be unfair to decide against them without fair trial. Technic, after all, is merely a tool, and if it is susceptible to misuse, it can also be put to use for good; indeed it is an essential—but not predominent—factor in any musical performance deserving the term great. There can be little dispute that the greatest exponent of virtuosity in our lists is Leopold Stokowski; he and his Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra have not only attained an incompar- able degree of technical excellence, but their re- corded repertory is so large and varied that it exhibits all phases of virtuosity, and if for no other reason, it is peculiarly valuable to study. It is also the most difficult. Of every man it may be said that he is a dozen; of Stokowski, a score, a hundred! To listen to one record of his and then to another is to go from amazement to bafflement, —with another disk, to irritation,—with a fourth, to profound admiration. To me, Stokowski is like the swan in the old fairy stories, which changed successively into a hawk, a fish, a snake, a dragon, or what monster have you; but which, if the hero held it tightly during all the meta- morphoses, eventually assumed its true shape, none other than that of the princess, and sur- rendered as gracefully as might be to her captor. And if we listen to and study Stokowski intently and doggedly enough and refuse to relax our at- tention and critical powers in either blind adora- tion or blind resentment of any of his “interpre- tations” (no matter what seemingly monstrous forms they may take), we are sure to find in the end a true artist, a man of unmistakable great- ness, Stokowski’s recording career is undoubtedly familiar to all my readers. He has recorded, of course, only with the Philadelphia Orchestra and with the Victor Company, but his releases cover a number of years, beginning with the early acoustical era. The development of the science of recording and of the prowess of his orchestra are as clearly evident in his disks as is the inner development within himself. His first recordings were of “encore pieces”, semi-classics, popular concert works (often in abbreviated versions), and isolated movements of symphonies, with the high water mark of the acoustical regime set by the Unfinished Symphony (the first symphony to be recorded by an American Orchestra), two movements of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Con- certo (with the composer as soloist), and the Fire Bird Suite of Strawinski. Then came the in- vention of the new process and the release of the Marche Slave , the Danse Macabre , and excerpts from the Polovstian Dances from Price Ic/or, and Dvorak’s New World Symphony (the first full length symphony to be recorded in this country.) From this point Stokowski’s releases have di- verged into two streams, first a “concert series” made up largely of re-recordings ( Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, Blue Danube Waltz , Invitation to the Waltz , Nutcracker Suite , Rienzi and