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

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

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