Johann STRAUSS II (1825-1899) – On the Beautiful Blue Danube 9 ...

Guild GmbH
Switzerland
GHCD 2392
2012 Guild GmbH
© 2012 Guild GmbH
1
2
Johann STRAUSS II (1825-1899) – On the Beautiful Blue Danube 9:14
First Release of this recording on CD
Alexander BORODIN (1833-1887)
‘Nocturne’ from String Quartet No. 2 in D major (arr: Sir Malcolm Sargent) 8:47
3
4
5
6
Niccolò PAGANINI (1782-1840) – Moto Perpetuo (arr: Angelo F. Lavagnino) 3:48
Sergei RACHMANINOFF (1873-1943) – Vocalise (arr: Arcady Dubensky) 7:24
George Frederic HANDEL (1685-1759) – Tamburino from ‘Alcina’ 1:18
(arr: William Gillies Whittaker)
Henry PURCELL (1659-1695) – Hornpipe from ‘King Arthur’ (arr: J. Herbage) 0:50
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
Christoph W. Ritter von GLUCK (1714-1787) – Four Pieces from Operas
Lento from ‘Iphigenie in Aulis’ (arr: Stokowski) 3:11
Musette from ‘Armide’ (arr: Stokowski) 1:51
Sicilienne from ‘Armide’ (arr: Stokowski) 3:02
Dance of the Blessed Spirits (Reigen) from ‘Orfeo ed Euridice’ (arr: Stokowski) 8:09
Luigi BOCCHERINI (1743-1805)
‘Minuet’ from String Quintet in E major, Op. 13 No. 5 (arr: Stokowski) 2:27
Peter TCHAIKOVSKY (1840-1893)
‘Andante Cantabile’ from String Quartet No. 1 in D major (arr: Stokowski) 8:05
Theodor BERGER (1905-1992) – Rondino Giocoso 4:22
From various Capitol and Seraphim LPs – recorded 1957-58

A GUILD HISTORICAL RELEASE
• Master source: Records from the collection of Edward Johnson
• Remastering from the original LPs: Peter Reynolds
• Final master preparation: Reynolds Mastering, Colchester, England
• Design: Paul Brooks, Design and Print, Oxford
• Art direction: Guild GmbH
• Executive co-ordination: Guild GmbH
■
■
■
Guild GmbH, Moskau 314b, 8262 Ramsen, Switzerland
Tel: +41 (0) 52 742 85 00 Fax: +41 (0) 52 742 85 09 (Head Office)
Guild GmbH, PO Box 5092, Colchester, Essex CO1 1FN, Great Britain
e-mail: info@guildmusic.com World WideWeb-Site: http://www.guildmusic.com
Leopold Stokowski and Sir Malcolm Sargent, 1951
WARNING: Copyright subsists in all recordings under this label. Any unauthorised broadcasting, public
performance, copying or re-recording thereof in any manner whatsoever will constitute an infringement of such
copyright. In the United Kingdom licences for the use of recordings for public performance may be obtained from
Phonographic Performances Ltd., 1 Upper James Street, London W1F 9EE.

as a composer of music for films. The Russian-American composer and violinist Arcady Dubensky
(1890-1966) had the distinction of a work by him, a setting of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem The Raven
for speaker and orchestra, being performed by Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra in the
1932 season; more than twenty years later, the conductor was to record Dubensky’s transcription
for string orchestra of Rachmaninoff ’s Vocalise, a wordless song originally published in 1912.
Two other transcriptions by English musicians of English music follow: the Tamburino from
Handel’s opera ‘Alcina’ in the version by the Northumbrian composer William Gillies Whittaker,
and the Hornpipe from Purcell’s ‘King Arthur’ as arranged by Julian Herbage, better known in his
later years as a BBC radio presenter of the classical music programme ‘Music Magazine’ on which
Stokowski himself appeared.
Finally, the original piece for string orchestra by the Austrian composer Theodor Berger, his
delightful Rondino Giocoso, about which we commented earlier, brings this fascinating programme
to its close.
© Robert Matthew-Walker, 2012
GHCD 2379-80 GHCD 2388-89
6
No matter how one considers the career of Leopold Stokowski, one is constantly brought
up short by an event, a fact of his long life, an aspect of his creativity that one may never,
or hardly ever, have considered before.
One may expect much from a musician who performed well into his nineties and recorded
regularly for around sixty years. Stokowski may not have been the longest-lived conductor, but
he was – surely – the most recorded, leaving a legacy that is not, 35 years after his death, as fully
appreciated as it deserves to be. One reason is that it takes a considerable leap of imagination to
consider that when Stokowski was born in 1882, Richard Wagner was still alive and Brahms had
not yet begun his Third Symphony; yet at the time of Stokowski’s death in 1977, he would certainly
have been aware of the rise of Punk Rock as exemplified by the Sex Pistols and The Clash, through
his sons’ interest in popular music of the time – they formed and appeared in their own rock band
with their father’s encouragement.
Stokowski retained a lifelong interest in the latest developments in music – popular as well as
classical – and his career is punctuated by a succession of premieres that at the time exemplified the
latest trends. Stokowski also knew that a creative artist needs, above all, encouragement, and during
his long life he encouraged very many composers, as shown by the astonishing list of around 2,000
premieres he conducted.
His work in opera, apart from concert hall repertoire and in the recording studio, is another
aspect of his career which is not fully grasped today; and although he made many recordings,
few are of him conducting opera. Yet of all the great conductors of the 20th century, Stokowski’s
recorded legacy does, on balance, detail the enormous range of his repertoire, his respect for the
score, and his willingness to change it on occasion when he felt it necessary to make the musical
point (a characteristic for which he was often criticised, yet which seems to have gone unremarked
upon when practised by many of his contemporaries).
Stokowski’s encouragement of new music was matched by his determination to ensure that the
established repertoire reached the widest possible audience. He was the first conductor to record
all of Brahms’s Symphonies – and with the same orchestra – and remains the only conductor to
have performed all of Schoenberg’s orchestral music during the composer’s lifetime, giving two
3

world premieres en route. As a fully trained church organist, being a Fellow of the Royal College
of Organists, he was not only assistant to Walford Davies at the Temple Church in London but also
orchestrated many of Bach’s organ works with a view to making them more accessible to generations
of music-lovers who never attended organ recitals in churches or cathedrals.
And so it is that, whichever aspect of Stokowski’s career is studied, one encounters details
which are rarely appreciated even today. Mention his name to many music-lovers and the image of
a conductor directing a large symphony orchestra will most readily come to mind: yet here, in this
collection of – almost exclusively – music for strings, we find yet another aspect of his work, into
which he poured as much energy and dedication as he did to all other parts of his musical life.
This collection opens with a very famous work for full orchestra, with which Stokowski’s name
was frequently associated. Johann Strauss II’s On the Beautiful Blue Danube Waltz, his Opus 314,
was written in 1866 and first performed the following year – sixteen years before Stokowski was
born – by which time it had travelled the musical world. Stokowski would go on to record the
work no fewer than seven times in all – from an acoustic Philadelphia Orchestra 78 in the early
1920s to this final recording. It is complete in every way, with all repeats scrupulously observed (the
earlier recordings were all cut to fit the playing-time of the old records, although one of Stokowski’s
electrical 78rpm recordings of the work sold over 1,000,000 copies). This reissue is the first time
Stokowski’s final and only stereo recording of the work has been issued on compact disc.
One of the more fascinating characteristics of Stokowski was his seemingly chameleon-like
ability to perform a wide variety of music and give convincing accounts of the individual works. In
the case of the Strauss Waltz, his performance of the complete score raises it to the level of a short
tone-poem, removed from the ballroom into the concert hall.
It makes a fine opening to our programme, the remainder of which, as we noted, comprises
music for string orchestra, almost all of which pieces are arrangements, before ending with Theodor
Berger’s Rondino Giocoso. Berger’s piece might well be the most unfamiliar item on the programme,
but it is by no means out of place here, although it was composed in 1933 and first performed
on New Year’s Day 1939 by the Dresden Staatskapelle under Wilhelm Furtwängler. Here one may
parenthetically comment that, despite having given so many premieres, Stokowski was one of the
very few major conductors to take up recently-written scores which may have received their first
performances by other artists.
Following Stokowski’s death in 1977 at the age of 95, his reputation has been considerably
enhanced by a large number of his performances being issued commercially – broadcast or reissues
of earlier recordings – with the result that we have a much more complete account of his life’s work
than previously. One aspect of his attainments which remained with him throughout his life was the
number of orchestral arrangements he made of music originally conceived for other instruments
or combinations. Many of these Stokowski arrangements were of music composed in the 17th and
18th centuries – the most famous being his Bach organ transcriptions alluded to earlier – music
which was otherwise ignored by the establishments, and therefore by music-lovers, of the day.
Our selection of such pieces includes Stokowski’s ‘suite’ of music by Gluck arranged for string
orchestra, with movements taken from three of his operas. These individual movements are not
necessarily meant to be performed together, but they follow one another here admirably. The other
Stokowski transcriptions in this collection include Boccherini’s famous Minuet from the String
Quintet Opus 13 No 5. This had achieved popular status at the time these recordings were made
owing to its use in the 1955 Ealing Studios film ‘The Ladykillers’, starring Sir Alec Guinness and
Peter Sellers. The Andante Cantabile movement from Tchaikovsky’s first String Quartet is another
example of a single movement from a classical piece becoming more famous than the work
from which it has been taken. A similar comment can also apply to the equally famous Nocturne
movement from Borodin’s String Quartet No 2 in the transcription by Sir Malcolm Sargent, a tune
more popularly known as the song ‘And this is my beloved’ from the musical show ‘Kismet’, which
had first opened on Broadway in 1953 (the music adapted from Borodin by Robert White and
George Forrest) and had been an immediate success. Having been originally composed for four
stringed instruments, the adaptations for full string orchestra of these movements meant relatively
little additional writing.
Much the same is true of four other transcriptions here: that by the Italian composer Angelo
Francesco Lavagnino of Paganini’s Moto Perpetuo has probably become the most famous of the
various arrangements this brilliant piece has had, Lavagnino (1909-1987) being more well-known
4 5