The first volume in this Goldberg edition was released on Music & Arts
CD-1223.
It was an 8-CD set of non-commercial recordings made between 1951 and 1970
and
I had little hesitation, given the rarity of the material and its
excellence,
in making it one of my 2010 Records of the Year (see
review).
Now here is the companion 8-CD box of commercial recordings made on 78s
between
1932 and 1951.
Szymon Goldberg was a superb stylist. His balanced musicianship made him a
Mozart
player of exceptional grace whose tonal sensitivity ensured that the
masculine
and feminine elements of the composer’s music were held in perfect
balance.
He was also a direct but adroit baroque player, and in his later Philips
LP
recordings he showed how resourceful a director he could be of
Bach’s
music.
Indeed this set starts with Bach. The 1951 A minor Concerto with Walter
Susskind
is oddly rare in its Parlophone pressing, as it wasn’t in the
catalogue
for too long. Goldberg’s natural, unruffled Bachian affinities are
cemented
in the E major concerto, again conducted by Susskind and this time with
Ernest
Lush, better known as an elite accompanist, playing the harpsichord.
Though
this was recorded three years earlier, it sounds brighter than the A
minor,
or possibly this reflects the state of the transferred discs. Certainly
Lush’s
harpsichord is better balanced than Geraint Jones’s in the A minor.
My
only complaint about this 1948 performance is the excessive slowing down
at
the end of the third 78 side as the first movement draws to a (very)
protracted
close.
Goldberg (1909-93) was a concertmaster of Furtwängler’s Berlin
Philharmonic.
The Nazi attempts to remove him in 1933 led to an outcry, but his position
was
always one that was balanced between carrot and stick. In December 1933,
shortly
before he left for London, he took part in the last of the Brandenburg
Concerto
recordings collected here, the First in F major. The others featuring him
are
Nos 2 and 4: the whole set was completed and issued on Polydor, the
conductor
being Alois Melichar. The accents are punched out in the finale of No.1
but
it’s not as heavy as many a post-war LP recording, and one can hear
many
of Goldberg’s orchestral colleagues, not least oboist Gustav Kern
and
elsewhere trumpeter Paul Spörri, flautist Albert Harzer and cellist
Hans
Bottermund.
The second disc continues with a well-turned performance of the ubiquitous
D
major sonata of Handel, with Gerald Moore and an even better Haydn C major
Concerto,
one of the gems in Goldberg’s discography. There’s an
especially
beautifully played slow movement but the whole reading, once again with
the
sympathetic collaboration of the Czech-born Walter Susskind, is splendid
in
every respect. Who, though, is the uncredited harpsichord player? The
second
disc ends with a Berlin Clangor set of the Haydn/Hoffstetter Quartet in F
major.
The performance of the Berlin Philharmonic String Quartet (Goldberg,
Gilbert
Back, Reinhard Wolf - a Nazi informer - and Nikolai Graudan) is good but
the
transfer sounds a bit watery. My own set has a deal of surface noise and
Clangor
was hardly the last word in quality control, I must admit, but it’s
also
clearer and more defined. I wonder whether transfer engineer Mark
Obert-Thorn
had a tape copy or CD-r to work from. It’s clear from his brief
booklet
note that he didn’t have access to the original shellacs.
The third disc introduces one to the great trio that recorded in 1939:
Goldberg, Anthony Pini and Lili Kraus. Their three Haydn trios are delectably
pointed and full of life. They were originally released as an album,
unavailable singly. The Paradis
Sicilienne - which is really
‘arranger’Samuel Dushkin’s own work, isn’t it?
- is heard in a rather dim-sounding 1932 Telefunken. Mozart’s
G major Concerto ends the disc in triumphant style (Philharmonia and
Susskind, 1951). This and the D major, recorded the following day, are
also gems of the violinist’s discography. Testament added the
Fifth Concerto, made around the same time, in their 1993 restoration,
so obviously it’s not duplicated in this Music & Arts set.
What we do have instead is the A major’s slow movement with a
contingent from the 1932 Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Paul Kletzki.
Throughout, Goldberg manages to balance expressive gesture with stylistic
precision. If he is not as obviously expressively generous as was, say,
Szigeti in his pre-war recording with Beecham of the D major, or as
sensually textured as Jacques Thibaud in his Mozart recordings, Goldberg
remains impervious to stylistic change.
Here we enter the heartland of the set. The Mozart Duos are with Frederick
Riddle
(1948) and pre-war with Hindemith (1934). The sequence of seven sonatas is
with
his sonata partner Lili Kraus. They appeared in two bulky albums at the
time,
and individual sonatas were not available separately, I believe: you had
to
buy on an album by album basis. Each sonata is beautifully characterised
and
selflessly performed. Goldberg’s characteristically small-scaled,
sweet
tone is well suited to these works and Kraus supplies her perfectly
adjudged
pianism.
Goldberg and Kraus recorded five Beethoven sonatas between April 1936 and
April
1937. Two of them, the
Spring and No.6 in A major, were recorded in
Tokyo
for Japanese Columbia. Kraus is an equal partner throughout, and is
outstanding
in the
Kreutzer, in particular, where Goldberg’s subtle
bowing
is notable. He is certainly not a grandiloquent Beethovenian and some may
well
find him a little too small-scaled in the last sonatas; I find his tone,
as
recorded, just a bit too thin in places. Nevertheless in the final sonata
in
G major his changes of colour and character are bewitching,
notwithstanding
the somewhat noisier and more distant recording quality of this 1937
English
Parlophone.
The final disc, No.8, includes the famous 1934 Hindemith Trio No.2 and.
Beethoven’s
Trio in D major, Op.8 both with Feuermann and Hindemith, both of which
have
been transferred several times before. There are also single movements
from
the same composer’s A major Op.18 quartet and from the Septet and
from
Dvořák’s
American quartet - all Berlin recordings
made
in 1932. The Berlin Clangors are characteristically whiskery but the 1932
German
Telefunken of Dvořák’s Slavonic Dance in E minor is a
lot
better. Note, though, as significant inducement, that the Clangors are
making
their first appearance in one set.
It is salutary to note that much of this material has hitherto only been
available
in transfers on Japanese Toshiba-EMI sets. The booklet contains a
biographical
portrait of the violinist and brief comments on the recordings. Talking of
those,
there’s a complete Goldberg discography, which will be of
considerable
value to readers. And to cap all this, these 8 CDs are available ‘as
for
six’.
Jonathan Woolf
Masterwork Index: Bach
Violin
concertos
~~
Brandenburg
concertos
Track-listing
CD 1 [72:51]
BACH
Violin Concerto. No. 1 in A Geraint Jones (harpsichord)/Philharmonia
Orchestra/Walter Susskind (1951)
Violin Concerto. No. 2 in E Ernest Lush (harpsichord) Philharmonia Orchestra/Walter
Susskind (1948)
Brandenburg Concerto No. 1 , Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra/Alois Melichar
(1933)
Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra/Alois
Melichar
(1932)
CD 2 [67:13]
Brandenburg Concerto No. 4 in G Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra/Alois
Melichar
(1933)
HANDEL
Violin Sonata in D, Op ,1 No 13 Gerald Moore (piano) (1947)
HAYDN
Violin Concerto No 1 in C; Philharmonia Orchestra/Walter. Susskind,.
(1947)
String Quartet. No 17 in F, Op, 3 No 5 (excerpts.); Berlin Philharmonic
String
Quartet (1932)
CD 3 [74:37]
Piano Trio in F sharp , H. XV 2; Piano Trio in C, H. XV 27; Piano Trio in
E
flat, H. XV 29 Lili Kraus (piano)/Anthony Pini (cello) (1939);
PARADIS
(arr. Dushkin) Sicilienne Árpád Sándor (piano) (1932)
MOZART
Violin Concerto No 3 in G, K216 . Philharmonia Orchestra/Walter Susskind
(1951)
CD 4 [77:44]
Violin Concerto No 4 in D, K218 Philharmonia. Orchestra/Walter Susskind
(1951)
Violin Concerto No 5 in A, K 219 Adagio, Members of the Berlin
Philharmonic
Orchestra/Paul Kletzki (1932)
Duo for Violin and Viola No 1 in G, K423 Frederick Riddle (viola)
(1948)
Duo for Violin and Viola No 2 in B flat, K424 Paul Hindemith (viola)
(1934)
Violin Sonata in C, K29 Lili Kraus (piano) (1935)
CD 5 [72:50]
Violin Sonata in F, K377
Violin Sonata in Bb, K378
Violin Sonata in G, K379*
Violin Sonata. in E flat, K380 Lili Kraus (piano) (*1935) and (1937)
CD 6 [72:00]
Violin Sonata in C, K404
Violin Sonata in E flat, K481* Lili Kraus (piano) (*1936) & (1937)
(arr. Kreisler) Serenade No 7 in D, K250 with piano (1937);
BEETHOVEN
Violin Sonata No. 2 in A, Op. 12, No. 2
Violin Sonata No. 5 in F, Op. 24, 'Spring' Lili Kraus (piano) (1936)
CD 7 [77:49]
Violin Sonata No. 6 in A, Op. 30, No. 1
Violin Sonata No. 9 in A, 'Kreutzer'
Violin Sonata No. 10 in G, Op. 96* Lili Kraus (piano) (1936) &
(*1937)
CD 8 [76:58]
String Trio in D, Op. 8 Paul Hindemith, (viola)/Emanuel Feuermann (cello)
(1934)
String Quartet in A, Op. 18, No. 5 Andante cantabile Berlin Philharmonic
Orchestra
Quartet (1932)
Septet. in E flat, Op. 29 Adagio cantabile Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra
Chamber
Ensemble (1932);
DVOŘÁK
String Quartet No. 12 in F, Op. 96 Lento cantabile Berlin Philharmonic
Orchestra
Quartet (1932)
(arr. Kreisler) Slavonic Dance in E, Op. 46, No. 2 Árpád
Sándor
(piano) (1932)
HINDEMITH
String Trio No. 2 (1933) Paul Hindemith (viola)/Emanuel Feuermann (cello)
(1934)
