Music Preserved: working to save “lost” recorded music

A new non-profit recording company has set up shop in Britain, Music Preserved, with the aim of reclaiming some important live performance recordings from the the 1950s (at least so far, it’s mostly from the 1950s).  There are several significant recordings in the first batch of ten: the Amadeus Quartet playing Mozart and Britten string quartets; William Walton’s Cello Concerto and Façade, conducted by Paul Sacher with Joan Cross and Peter Pears as the reciters; and, most significantly, a recording of the first performance at the Covent Garden Opera House of Benjamin Britten’s coronation opera Gloriana, with Joan Cross as Queen Elizabeth and Peter Pears as the Earl of Essex. John Pritchard was the conductor.  The performance has historically had the reputation of being one of opera’s greatest fiascos; however, in the live recording (which has been cleaned up, but still is obviously a “vintage” recording), the applause is more than polite, and the performance is electric.  There are so few recordings of Joan Cross (she was the original Ellen Orford in Peter Grimes in 1945) that this is a recording to be treasured. After later redemption through recordings by Sarah Walker, Josephine Barstow (not to mention the DVD film of Gloriana starring Barstow, but which leaves out significant portions of the opera) and a live performance by Christine Brewer, all of which were effective in there own ways, it is fascinating to hear Ms. Cross’s “ur-performance.”  As with so many of Britten’s custom-made roles the notes fit her voice perfectly.  The orchestral playing is rich and thrilling, even through the 1950s live technical limitations.  Peter Pears sings well enough, but seems miscast as the ardent young Earl of Essex and the Queen’s love interest.  The cast is populated with other Covent Garden and Britten stalwarts of the day: the young Geraint Evans, Monica Sinclair, Jennifer Vyvyan.

Besides the Gloriana recording, I have also downloaded the Walton recording which includes Façade.  It is also commendable, despite some minor slips in the instrumental playing.  Cross and Pears are deadpan in the recitations of Edith Sitwell’s surreal poems.

The recordings are available as mp3 and lossless downloads through the Chandos download site at reasonable prices (in British pounds).

One of the upcoming recordings announced is a Covent Garden of Britten’s Peter Grimes from 1958, with Pears and Sylvia Fisher, who, notably, does NOT appear in the composer’s recording of the opera made a few months later.  This endeavor is worthy of support.

As good as (better than?) Christmas

I like receiving packages in the mail, especially of stuff I want, so today I hit a triple bonanza:

• I received (finally!) a big box that I had mailed to myself from Minneapolis at the end of the AGO convention on June 27th. (I’m going to overlook the fact that I sent it Priority Mail on the 27th, and it was apparently received on July 1st at the main post office in Cleveland, but I just got a notice in my mail box yesterday, despite the fact that I’ve checked my mail twice since July 1st. It was obviously just sitting around somewhere at the post office for a week. Nonetheless I’m glad it’s here—I was worried that it was permanently lost.) It was filled with dirty clothes (not important), a pair of Birkenstock sandals (important, but not something I was looking forward to), and a bunch of music that I bought at the convention, including some quite expensive European organ music that is hard to come by in the U.S. (Breitkopf & Härtel editions of Mendelssohn, and an edition of Scheidt keyboard music) plus some choral music.
• I received the DVD of Paul Festa’s film Apparition of the Eternal Church, with a lovely handwritten note from him. (See previous post about the film)
• Finally, I received two just-released DVDs of two operas by Benjamin Britten: Peter Grimes and Billy Budd. These are the first commercial releases of two films made in the 1960s with Britten’s partner Peter Pears in the starring roles. They both have other members of Britten’s “musical family” in the casts—Heather Harper, John Shirley Quirk, Bryan Drake. I remember that the Peter Grimes film was shone on PBS when I was in high school, but, being in the days before cable TV, the reception on the TV in Scranton, Iowa, was terrible, so I missed most of it. The film of Billy Budd is famous, but I’ve never seen it. I’m glad that Decca and BBC have finally released them. (There are some other titles in the Britten-Pears Collection.)

What a shame I have to go to work tomorrow.  It’s tempting to stay home and watch DVDs.  But I’ll be set for the next few evenings.

A classic video “Little Miss Muffet”

I stumbled across this video tonight. It’s very famous: Dudley Moore on Beyond the Fringe parodying Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten, singing a fake Britten-like setting of “Little Miss Muffet.” It is hilarious.

Mstislav Rostropovich is dead

The great Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich died today at the age of 80. It was only a month ago that there were major celebrations in honor of his 80th birthday. The latest issue of Gramophone is sitting on my chair at home with the cover headline “Rostropovich at 80.” The news was all over the media today. It was the headline story on the 7:00 AM NPR news when my alarm clock went off today. The New York Times published an obituary.

It is hard to overestimate his importance in the music world, as the leading cellist of the late 20th century, as a conductor, as a pianist (accompanying his wife, the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya), and above all a champion of new music. Major works by Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Britten, Penderecki and many others are the result of Rostropovich commissions.

One of my life-long memories is a performance of Britten’s War Requiem in Carnegie Hall in the late ’70s, with Rostropovich conducting the National Symphony Orchestra, with two of the three vocal soloists for whom the piece was written, Galina Vishnevskaya, soprano; Peter Pears, tenor; along with the baritone John Shirley-Quirk, who by this time was considered the authoritative interpreter of the baritone solos written for Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. (I later heard Shirley-Quirk sing the part with the Cleveland Orchestra.) But the Carnegie Hall performance was a bit of history, with its direct link to Britten

NPR featured another story on Rostropovich in the evening on “All Things Considered,” an interview with Yo Yo Ma, who is probably Rostropovich’s successor as the most brilliant cellist of a later generation. It was moving to hear Ma’s veneration for the master.

“Gloriana” in a new way

“Britten – Gloriana / Josephine Barstow, Tom Randle, Emer” (BBC / Opus Arte)

I have recently acquired a quite astonishing DVD realization of Benjamin Britten’s opera Gloriana starring Dame Josephine Barstow as Queen Elizabeth I and the American tenor Tom Randle as the Earl of Essex. The film is directed by Phyllida Lloyd, British stage director who directed the stage performances at Opera North upon which this DVD production is based. Gloriana, written by Britten for the coronation festivities of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 is considered one of the great operatic disasters of all time; however the past fifty years and several productions have proven that the opera has real staying power and may be one of Britten’s best works.

The DVD is astonishing from two standpoints:

(1) The performance is only 100 minutes and leaves out a considerable chunk of the opera–in fact, it leaves out everything that doesn’t have immediately to do with the relationship between the queen and Essex. (How did they convince the Britten Estate to do that?) The result is a much more compelling drama, without the elements that were required for the opera house, especially the second-act “masque” which was pretty music and dance to please the opening night audience.

(2) This performance blends the reality of behind-the-scenes in the opera house with the performance, and ultimately blurs the line between Josephine Barstow as performer and aging woman and the character of Queen Elizabeth. There are scenes from the opera house production that blend into Barstow as queen taking refuge in her dressing room, away from the trials of 16th century England. It is one of the most brilliant realizations of opera to film that I have seen, as it draws upon the best elements of both.

Unlike many opera singers, both Josephine Barstow and Tom Randle can act with enough subtlety to sustain close-ups: she, regal yet privately vulnerable; he, sexy, impulsive, high-strung. Paul Daniel conducts, and the musical values are as impressive as the visuals.