Beethoven - The Premiere Recordings
Ludwig van BEETHOVEN (1770 - 1827)
Symphony No. 3 in E Flat, Op. 55, Eroica (1803) - abridged [22:55] ¹
Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op.67 (1807) [29:05] ²
New Queen’s Hall Orchestra/Henry Wood ¹
Odeon Symphony Orchestra/Friedrich Kark ²
rec. 1910 (No.5) and 1922 (No.3)
HISTORIC RECORDINGS HRCD0001 [52:20]
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. 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