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I recently came across one of my own old Schwann catalogs. I thought I had long since discarded them, but I still had one from July 1983. (I had started collecting them beginning in 1979).  That we live in a golden age of recording is emphasized by what you could get in those days.

Do you like Raff? They were only three LPs available: Ponti's recording of the Piano Concerto, a competing one on the Genesis label, and Ruiz's recording of the Suite in D minor.  That was it, nothing else.  The Turnabout recording of the 3rd Symphony was out print by then.

Do you like Pfitzner? There was only one thing available, DG's recording of "Palestrina". Nothing else.

But even among mainstream composers there were many surprising gaps.  For Robert Schumann there are no recordings of the third violin sonata, and of the other two there are only three: Zeitlin on Vox, the Laredos on Desto, Gorevic, long time principal violist of my local symphony, on Crystal. 

What's interesting about these lonely three recordings is that not a one is on what were then the major labels of the day: RCA, Columbia/CBS, EMI/Angel, Decca/London, Phillips, and DG.  Schumann, in 1983 treated like Bruch: a few favorites and little else. 

And so it goes, composer after composer:the unsung composers we discuss here represented by one or two recordings or not at all, and even major composers represented by recordings of a limited number celebrated works, but the rest of their output ignored.

First recordings of the Weigl 2nd and 4th Quartets have been out for a while, but the intonation of the Ensemble Mark Rothko makes these a chore to listen to.  I'm familiar with 1st violin Carlo Lazari, who recorded the Rubinstein violin sonatas back in the 90s. 

https://www.jpc.de/jpcng/classic/detail/-/art/werke-fuer-streichquartett/hnum/11522738

..."I Knew Doris Day before She Became a Virgin".

The other night I watched the (highly fictionalized) biopic "Rhapsody in Blue".  Oscar Levant plays a prominent role, as he did in "An American in Paris" and "Humoresque".  It got me to thinking of Levant -- not only his celebrated wit, but his efforts as a concert pianist (which, as he put it, was a pretentious way of saying that he was unemployed).  I found that in 2018 Sony issued an 8-CD box of all his classical recordings, accompanied by a 124-page book.  Alas, like most of the Sony boxes of the back catalog that have been released in recent years, this one became unavailable almost as soon as it was released (am I the only one to notice this irritating Sony box phenomenon?), but I did find this wonderful discussion of it in "Commentary" magazine:

The Man Who Wasn't Gershwin

Most of the set is devoted to the standard rep, of course, but the variety of works in it shows a broad taste in music from Bach to Shostakovich.  Of particular interest to the readers of this board is his Rubinstein 4, recorded with Mitropoulos leading the New York Phil.  Of course, this recording is hardly unknown, but in all these years I had never heard it, so I listened to it on YouTube, not expecting much -- archival sound, a comedian playing at being a virtuoso, but little more.

It's amazing. 

Yes, the sound is archival and Levant is too forward in the mix, but this is by far the best performance of the Rubinstein 4 that I have ever heard.  What makes it so good is how lovingly shaped and phrased it is, bar after bar.  The Rubinstein 4 is a good concerto, but hardly a great one, yet in Mitropoulos's hands you become convinced that you are listening to one of the great masterpieces of music.  The attention to detail is unlike any other performance I have heard.  And Levant, far from just being along for the ride, matches Mitropoulos at every turn, playing like a true virtuoso.  It shows how good modest material can sound when placed in the best hands.

Finally, returning to "Humoresque", 40 years ago SCTV did a goofy parody of it, called "New York Rhapsody".  Leave it to the SCTV crew to poke fun at a movie most of their audience probably never heard of:

In another thread I mentioned listening to one of the quartets of Ernst Krenek. Indeed, I have been been on quite a Krenek kick the last few weeks, pouring through his symphonies, quartets, and sonatas. Nothing he wrote belongs here, but he put me into mind of Alex Ross's book on modern music, "The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century". In it, I found this interesting passage:

"In the late 18th century, 84% of the repertory of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra consisted of music by living composers. By 1855, the figure had declined to 38%, by 1870 to 24%. Meanwhile, the broader public was falling in love with the cakewalk and other popular novelties.  Schoenberg's reasoning [for abandoning the public] was this: if the bourgeois audience was losing interest in new music, and if the emerging mass audience had no appetite for classical music new or old, the serious artist should stop flailing his arms in a bid for attention and instead withdraw into a principled solitude".

This raises an interesting chicken or egg question. Did modernism in music drive away audience interest, especially in the new, or is modernism a reaction to an audience increasingly beholden either to the past or to the latest technologically enabled inanities of pop culture?  What is especially curious is the rapid decline in the programming of new music right at the very point where we of this website find so much interest, the age of mid to late 19th century Romanticism.  It long predates the advent of atonality and serialism. 

Last year we discussed unsung music appropriate to express our feelings about the death Queen Elizabeth II.  In less than two weeks we will experience the happier occasion of the coronation of His Majesty King Charles III.  The event is sure to include the usual coronation favorites by the the likes of Handel & Co., but for our purposes let's imagine that each of us had the opportunity to select music for a coronation that would consist of works by unsung composers within our remit.  What would you choose?

I confess that I could not come up with much.  I am not all that familiar with the choral works of many of our unsung composers, at least choral works of a majestic, celebratory character that would be appropriate for a coronation, and because operas, which are a great source for stage pageantry, are seldom recorded if composed by an unsung composer.  Still, with a bit of effort, I'm sure you could dig something up.

From the world of opera I would suggest the Bridal Procession from Rubinstein's opera Feramors, although perhaps it has a bit too much of an Eastern flavor.  Also from the operatic Rubinstein I would nominate the Festival March from Nero.  Looking at the score I see that this originally had a chorus, which explains why, in the form recorded by Michael Halasz and the Slovak Phil Bratislava, there seems to be something missing.  Of course, the original text had something to do with proclaiming Nero a god, which won't do at all, but I'm sure we could substitute something more appropriate for the occasion.  Let's have the poet laureate earn his keep, eh?

Raff comes to the rescue with his delightful Festmarsch, Op. 159.  It has a restrained sense of ceremony, more festive than pompous, which is to its credit.  Slightly less effective but still a worthy candidate is the final movement of the Orchestral Suite #1, Op. 101, which is a straight forward, upbeat, but restrained march.  As for choral music, how about our guy's Te Deum, WoO 16 (1853)?  It's short, straight to the point, but entirely appropriate, especially given that it was written for the coronation of Grand Duke Karl Alexander of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach-Ratzenfratzen. (OK, I made up the last part of his realm, but the rest is real.)

Any suggestions?

Forthcoming from Naxos, Rubinstein's Preludes and Fugues, Op. 53

https://www.jpc.de/jpcng/classic/detail/-/art/anton-rubinstein-werke-fuer-klavier/hnum/11168350

One brand new one (2023) and one from last year (2022) that seemed to slip under the radar.

2022:
Caprices, Op. 21 and Six Pieces, Op. 51

2023:
Preludes, Op. 24 and Etudes, Op. 81

I am happy to report that if you liked the recent Petersen Third Symphony, you will very much enjoy the Coviello disc of his music for violin and piano. 

Wilhelm Petersen: Sämtliche Werke für Violine & Klavier

Like the symphony, it's mostly written in an accessible, high-romantic style.  Only the Op. 11 Prelude & Double Fugue flirts with modernism, sounding like Reger at his most densely chromatic.  Not so the three sonatas and other works, which are much more conservative.

Even if you didn't like the 3rd Symphony, these might be worth investigating. 

Note there is an error with the track listing on the site and the CD for disc 2.  The correct order (from an loose leaf insert included with the discs) is:

Vier kleine Stucke: tracks 1-4
Vier Miniaturen: tracks 5-8
Sonata Nr. 3: tracks 9-11

The Chicago-based pianist and composer Easley Blackwood, son of the noted bridge player, died on January 22.

His works up to age 50 are in an atonal style, although listening to some of them tonight they seem more highly chromatic than truly based on tone-rows. Call them freely atonal, like late David Diamond.

But in the 1980s he would have a change of heart and began a sort of chameleon-like existence, writing works in the style of other composers, though without actually sounding like imitations or pastiche. Thus, his two clarinet sonatas sound like Reger, while his Fifth Symphony and Third String Quartet recall Sibelius. His Second Viola Sonata suggests Bartok, and his massive 40-minute Cello Sonata sounds for all the world like something written in Robert Schumann's day.  His goal, he said, was to write something that Schubert might have written had he lived into the 1840s.  Of all his works, it's the one that fits most comfortably into our remit, followed by the clarinet sonatas. 

On YouTube:

New from CPO:

https://www.jpc.de/jpcng/cpo/detail/-/art/adolf-busch-streichquartett-op-57/hnum/8992778

And a flute quintet, too. 

Does anyone know where Tra Nguyen found the score to the 6 Poemes, Op. 15?  I can't find it at IMLSP, Edition Nordstern, or any other obvious place.

In recognition of Raff's 200th, I spent a week going through some of the recordings I don't visit as often as I should.  Included in this were the four discs of piano suites from AK Coburg, played by Alexander Zolotarev.  This time, though, I paid special attention to Raff's transcriptions of the Bach cello suites.  Does anyone else enjoy them as much as I do?  Raff essentially expands on what Bach merely suggests in his suites, filling in the harmonies, the implied counterpoint, and even constructing whole new melodies that are suggested in Bach's spare structure.  At the same time, Raff makes them sound perfectly idiomatic, as if these were original keyboard suites by Bach himself.  He never imposes a Romantic idiom on the music, the way Busoni might have.

If you haven't heard them in a while, they are worth taking another look at. 

I returned to Herzogenberg's late oratorio (1894) not long ago and now cannot sing its praises highly enough.  If you like Bach's cantatas, you will enjoy this very backward-looking take on the idiom -- a Baroque sacred oratorio in Romantic garb.

I have the Hänssler recording, which I think very fine in almost every respect: nice sound, good performances.  The caveats are modest.  The texts are summaries rather than full transcriptions of the words, the tracking is limited (there only three, one for each part of the oratorio), and the track listing is wrong (all the more inexplicable given there are only three tracks to begin with).

I now have the CPO on order.  CPO fits the whole action on one disc (79 minutes) to Hänssler's two (82 minutes total), which is an advantage, and CPO divides each part into multiple tracks.  This is all to CPO's credit, but it is hard to imagine they will beat Hänssler's great sound and performance.  We will see.

Unless it is buried somewhere in the archives, a four-volume set of the complete piano music of Friedrich Kiel, issued by Verlag Dohr beginning in 2002 with Oliver Drechsel at the piano, seems to have escaped notice.

I have finished volume one, which is not bad, though I wish they had not chosen to record it on an historical piano, in this case an 1868 Theodore Stöcker. At least it is better than the 1838 Erard that sank a recent recording of the four-hand piano music of Reinecke. 

Is it just me or are the Decca "Eloquence" reissues among the hardest things to find?  What should be an inexpensive re-issue series has become the subject of some of my most desperate internet searches.  I suspect, though I am unsure, that they were meant for distribution among the Commonwealth nations rather than the US.  I well remember my exultation upon managing to have delivered into my hands Bernard Herrmann's Phase-4 recording of Holst's Planets.  And so it is with the present disc, which I never thought would ever be reissued.

About 40 years ago I tuned in to a broadcast of a remarkable sacred cantata.  I missed the beginning, so I didn't know what I was listening to, but I was completely taken by what I heard  -- bowled over, really, the way you are bowled over the first time you hear Carmina Burana -- and wanted to cheer when the chorus's final amens ended.  When it was over, the announcer gave its curious title, which sounded more like a description: The Fun and Faith of William Billings, American, by Robert Russell Bennett (1894-1981).

The cantata, then only a few years old, was written in 1976 on a commission to celebrate the American bicentennial.  It was recorded by Decca for limited US distribution as the official souvenir album of the Kennedy Center.  Most of Bennett's work lies outside the remit of this board, and even what almost qualifies I have never warmed to: his Violin Concerto makes me cringe with its (intentional) pop elements, while his Abraham Lincoln symphony never fully gets off the ground, despite many good ideas.  In his Billings cantata, however, everything comes together.  He mines Billings for tunes that he then freely develops in a grand, unabashedly romantic style, despite the classical era source material and the composer's 20th century upbringing.  The result is, like Carmina Burana, intentionally backward looking, but all the better for it.

I long ago gave up ever seeing it on CD, so about 10 years ago I tracked down a copy of the LP.  Then in 2014 the UK-based Antal Dorati Centenary Society issued a CDR transfer of the LP -- clicks, pops, and all -- which I picked up as a stop-gap.  There were no notes or texts, but it was nice to have it in a more convenient format.  I concluded, however, that this LP transfer indicated that Decca would never sponsor an authorized re-issue from the masters.

A few weeks ago, while seeing if I could locate a copy of the score or the texts, I chanced upon the official Decca reissue.  It seems they released it in 2016 in their Eloquence series.  Given the American theme of the release (it also includes William Schuman's Three Places in New England, which lies outside our remit), I found it curious that it would appear in a series that seemed to be for Commonwealth distribution.  In any case, I snapped up a very good used copy, though I see it is listed at JPC, but whether you'd get a real CD now or just a CDR reprint is anyone's guess.  But give it a shot.  It's hoot.  The Eloquence re-release includes full notes and texts, which even my LP did not have.

What I am listening to right now is the Notos Quartet's 2017 recording of the Dohnanyi Piano Quartet in F sharp minor (1894) and Bartok Piano Quartet in C minor (1898).  I believe both are recording premieres.  And I think we can safely discuss the Bartok because 1) it's only been played twice in public and has never been recorded, and 2) it's even more conservative than the Dohnanyi and makes Reger sound like Schoenberg.



N.B edited and turned into a new separate thread.

Jeremy Norris's out-of-print 1994 book, The Russian Piano Concerto, Volume I: The Nineteenth Century, is available for download in its original form as a 1988 dissertation: https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/1786/1/DX183136.pdf