Phonograph Monthly Review, Vol. 3, No. 9 (1929-06)

June, 1929 The Phonograph Monthly Review 315 poem—has caused considerable commotion in British gramophonic circles. The May issue of ‘‘The Gramophone” contains a plaint by a British dealer that ‘‘to offer Poulenc and Witkowski to a public unable or unwilling to assimilate in respectable quantities the simple melodies of Haydn and Mozart is just about on a par with including in a matriculation curiculum the novels of James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, and Marcel Proust, and the poems of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and D. H. Lawrence in preference to the novels of Dickens, Thackeray Scott and the poems of Milton, Keats and Shelley.” To rank Poulenc—a clever and talented youngster with a genuine talent for amusing salon music—with Joyce and Eliot and Proust, even by in- ference, is preposterous, but the mention of Witkowski’s name, an unfamiliar one in this country, led me to hope that perhaps the comparison might be more conceivable in his case. A single hearing of his Lake more than sufficed to demonstrate that it was not. Witkowski, ne Martin, was a cavalry officer. I lean., taking to composition rather late and studying with dTndy. He was born in 1867. Mon Lac was written in 1921 and falls into three sections: Prelude (one part), Theme and Variations (three parts), and Finale (two parts). The work is a grievous disappointment if one has expected something new and significant. To rank it as modernistic is sheer ridiculousness. Witkowski’s idiom smacks a bit of early French impressionism, but muddled with a super- Straussian turgidity. A few tricks of the modernists are employed, but the music is so completely lacking in point and distinction, and the composer is so at sea in what he is doing, that the net effect is that of tremendous wallowing in blurred sonorities. There are ideas and good ones oc- casionally, but they are allowed to speak for themselves but a brief second before they are swallowed by the roiled waters of Witkowski’s muddy instrumentation. Long be- fore the end one longs for the blessed relief of one clean- cut, decisive, individual phrase. The soloist, Robert Casadesus of the noted French family, does his best with the performance, but the com- poser gives him poor support. It is impossible to judge the recording, per se, on account of the blurred character of the work, but it does not seem particularly effective. The piano tone is jangly at times, but at others reasonably good. I have devoted more space to Witkowski and his Lake than their significance justifies, but I feel that it is im- portant to dispell the idea that this is a notable addition to the growing lists of recorded modern music of worth. France has given us a number of fine things in the way of phonographic examples of contemporary music and it is a pity that time and money should be wasted on a nonentity like this when Strawinski’s Sacre, Bartok’s Dance Suite and Piano Concerto, Sibelius’ Symphonies, Prokofieff’s Scythian Suite, Roussel’s Symphony and a host of other important modern works remain unrecorded. British Brunswick 30131-2 (2 D12s) Respighi: Trittico Botticelliano, played by A. Bernard and the London Cham- ber Orchestra. (Imported through The Gramophone Shop, New York City.) I. Spring (part 1). II. The Adoration of the Magi (parts 2 and 3). III. The Birth of Venus (part 4). This Tripytych for chamber orchestra was written in 1927 and performed for the first time at Vienna in Septem- ber of that year at a concert organized by Mrs. Elizabeth S. Coolidge. The composer conducted it at concerts of the Cleveland Symphony and other American orchestras during the past season. A. Bernard and the London Chamber Orchestra make the most that would seem possible with this work. The gay rhythms of Spring are pleasing, but the moods of the other two “pictures” are prolonged a trifle too thoroughly. The recording is good. A British colleague has hit off Respighi so neatly in a review of this particular work that I cannot forbear quoting him: “I feel more than ever convinced that Respighi could write as well as any man alive for the better sort of cinema film> whose flamboyance and generosity of scale he could so well match. His intellectual calibre is some- times above that of all but the best films; most often it is about that of the showy, second-rate ones. It is idle for anyone to pretend that he is in any sense a great composer. His fluency and sense of mass and colour never fail him, and at times he hits off a simple idea with charm- ing taste; but nine-tenths of the time his ideas are trivial, and he has no real power of developing them.” (K. K. in “The Gramophone.”) Parlophone E-10799-80 (2 D12s) Liszt: Mephisto Waltz (Second Episode from Lenau's “Faust”—The Dance in the Village Tavern), played by Josef Pembur. (Imported through the New York Band Instrument Company.) I am not sure whether this is the piano transcription by Busoni of the orchestral work, The Dance in the Village Tavern-Mephisto Waltz, or one of the Mephisto Waltzes written directly for piano. The orchestral version of the former is occasionally played. It pictures a marriage feast where Mephistopheles goads on the festivities and tempts Faust with a black-eyed peasant girl. Faust and the girl “dance through the open door, thrugh garden and over meadow, to the forest. Fainter and fainter are heard the tones of the fiddle: they are heard through songs of birds and in the wondrous dream of sensual forgetfulness.” When the work was first played in Boston, by Theodore Thomas in 1870, John S. Dwight, a leading critic of the time, found it “positively devilish. . . . Such music is simply diabolical, and shuts out every ray of light and heaven, from whence music sprng.” Yet its performance has not yet been prohibited by the censor; Koussevitzky played it a year or two ago and with con- siderable success. Professor Pembaur plays it here with admirable force and effectiveness. The recording is excellent. Yet it requires patience to hear it to the end. The record sides are not nearly filled; surely two ten-inch disks could have contained it all, or a few cuts might have been made. British Columbia 9589-90 (2 D12s) Moussorgsky: Boris Godounow-Prologue (three parts) sung by A. Cambon and H. Dallerand, accompanied by the Chorus and Orchestra of the Theatre National de l’Opera—Paris; and Polonaise (one part) sung by Mme. J. Ferrer, accompanied by the Orchestra of the Paris Opera. (Imported through the H. Royer Smith Company, Philadelphia.) Sung in French and recorded in the Paris Opera House. A magnificent example of modern realism in recording. The orchestra is fairly good, but the soloists and chorus are superb. The tonal splendors of the Coronation Scene (parts 3 of the Prologue) are caught no less effectively than the vivacity of the Polonaise. Great music, broadly performed, and recorded in its full spaciousness and grandeur. These disks will be welcome for American release. A large number of Polydor records imported through the H. Royer Smith Company of Philadelphia have been await- ing review for several months. The list is topped by three string quartets played by the Buxbaum Quartet (Eyle, Starkmann, Moravec, nd Buxbaum) : Brahms’ in A minor, Op. 51, No. 2; Mozart’s in D, K. 575; and Haydn’s in G minor. Op. 74, No. 3 (“Horseman”). The Buxbaum four is hardly to be ranked among the first rate string quartets, but it gives sound, well reasoned, and capably executed per- formances The Brahms work is the one available acous- tically from the Leners in the American Columbia. A re- recording is welcome even, although the reading does not equal that of the Vienna organization. I do not believe that the Mozart and Haydn works have been recorded completely before. Both, but particularly the Mozart, are worth every music lover’s attention. First among the piano disks is a three-part recording of Mozart’s Fantasia in C minor (from the Fantasia and Sonata), with the same composer’s D minor Fantasia on the odd side (Polydor 95131-2). Franz Josef Hirt is the pianist and his performances are in the romantic Teutonic vein, not at all the crystalline Mozart playing we hear most often in this country, but indubitably effective in its own way. Hirt also plays a three part version of Liszt’s