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

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
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