For years the received wisdom was that the first complete
recording of the Beethoven Violin Concerto was the one made by
Isolde Menges. Actually Juan Manen had just beaten her to that
honour. Similarly when one thought of the Fifth it was of Nikisch’s
1913 Berlin recording. Various other recordings came close. The
Victor Concert Orchestra under Josef Pasternack, for example,
left behind a 1916-17 traversal. Shortly after François
Ruhlmann directed an orchestra on Pathé. Later acoustic
entrants included Landon Ronald and the Royal Albert Hall Orchestra
in 1922 and Otto Urack and the Vox Symphonie in the following
year, closely followed by Seider-Winkler and the Neues Symphonie.
But they had all been upstaged by a pioneering effort in 1910
by
Friedrich Kark, who directed the
Odeon
Symphony Orchestra.
Kark was born in Hamburg in 1869 and was a recording pioneer.
He was the musical director for German Odeon during the years
1906-10 so was auspiciously placed to conduct this uncut first
ever recording for his own company. One must accept the recording
principles of the day. You can hear individual violin lines;
the reduced combination sounds very small, chamber sized, possibly
something like 6-2-2 and then brass augmentation or substitution
for the string basses. Wind parts were equally scaled down. The
percussion is audible however despite the boxiness of the acoustic
and the severe compression of the forces. There are a few mishaps
- there a pizzicato slip in the scherzo, but unanimity of attack
was pretty much conditional in nerve wracking circumstances such
as these. Kark emerges as a businesslike conductor, with the
usual romanticised gestures at the start and a strong, bluff
energy elsewhere. There was a transfer of this on the Japanese
Wing label some years ago but I’ve not had access to it
for comparative purposes.
The Kark is a stand-alone disc from Historic Recordings but for
the purposes of this review the company has kindly augmented
it for me with Henry Wood’s 1922
Eroica (CDs are
custom-made
and
comprise the purchaser's selections). This was something of a
cause célèbre
because
despite admiration for the performance (a fact often forgotten)
Wood
and Columbia were heavily censured for the truncation. Nevertheless
despite the mutilation one can say that this was the first ever
recording, as with the companion Kark, just beating Oskar Fried
and Frieder Weissmann - both with the Berlin State, but the former
for Polydor and the latter for Parlophone.
It was interesting going back to look at a few contemporary comments
about Wood in the light of this recording. By 1925 he was considered
a ‘sad disappointment’ in the recording studio according
to a critic of the day. Whether this was wholly interpretative
or whether the repertoire - rather bitty - had something to do
with it one can’t be sure. Still, in 1926 he re-recorded
the
Eroica and that performance far more than this one,
shows his tough and confident approach in its best light. This
earlier recording with its raft of bass reinforcements offers
a fascinating glimpse at the editorial processes current with
regard to abridged recordings - the majority, after all.
There are no notes, as is house style with this company. I don’t
particularly regret that if it keeps costs down and allows specialists
to get on with the business in hand - namely, accessing very
decent sounding transfers of (in the Kark case) very rare historic
material.
Jonathan Woolf
New Queen’s Hall Orchestra/Henry
Wood (3)
