Volume Four – and counting
– and Doremi is staying loyal to the
Prince of Violists, William Primrose.
That said, collectors will be in a dilemma.
The so-called Handel is the Casadesus
forgery and it’s hardly terra incognita
as far as CD transfers are concerned.
The Kreisler Praeludium and Allegro,
a fine envoi, is similarly also represented
in the catalogue. So it’s the Berlioz
with Toscanini, which will stir the
most interest though this originally
appeared on a Toscanini Society LP and
has recently been re-issued by Music
& Arts, a disc to which regrettably
I’ve not had access.
The Primrose completist
should know that neither the Casadesus
nor the Kreisler transfers measure up
against the competition. Turn to a recent
Naxos disc and you’ll find the Doremi
corpulent in the extreme with bass heavy,
unaertated textures; Mark Obert-Thorn’s
work is greatly preferable. Rick Torres
for Biddulph has also transferred this
and his has a touch of Sheffield Steel
in the sound mix, less warm and immediate
than Obert-Thorn’s work, but still leagues
ahead of this Doremi. Note that the
Pearl Primrose disc (with the Sinfonia
Concertante with Spalding and the Brahms
Second Sonata with Moore) has the pre-war
British recording of the Casadesus conducted
by Goehr – the post War Weissmann is
in any case the better performance.
The Kreisler faces
competition from a Pearl disc, which
sports the two Brahms sonatas (Kapell
in No.1 and Moore – as above – in No.2),
Benjamin and Harris. This Roger Beardsley
work is similarly preferable to the
Doremi – a lot of characteristic Pearl
bacon fat fry is preferable to tubby
sonics and shellac thumps.
Which leaves the Berlioz.
This was recorded privately for Toscanini,
and he played it to Primrose when the
Scotsman came to the conductor’s plush
villa. Poor Primoroso the Italian
snickered when he listened to the slightly
earlier commercial disc that Primrose
had recorded with Koussevitzky. The
contours of the performance are certainly
divergent. Toscanini is significantly
broader than the Russian in Harold in
the Mountains but makes up for lost
ground in the March of the Pilgrims,
whose alert clip is more sharply etched
than the earlier 1944 recording and
radically different from Beecham’s more
leisurely restraint in his later LP
with Primrose. Similarly with the Serenade
where Toscanini’s ideas diverge markedly
from Koussevitsky’s, whose Orgy is also
less tense than Toscanini’s. Primrose
and Toscanini mavens will necessarily
need a recording of this Harold, whether
in Music & Arts’ transfer or this
one. Here there’s been some noise reduction
but the results are very listenable.
Jonathan Woolf
for
details
Franz Rupp (piano), recorded August 1941
