Australian Eloquence

Two pupils of the great Julius Katchen are featured in the piano music of Liszt on this 2CD set. Pascal Rogé was eighteen years old when he recorded the Liszt Piano Sonata, Mazeppa, Vallée d’Obermann and the third Liebestraum in London in December, 1969. It was during the 1967 International Competition Georges Enesco that Rogé was first discovered. He was sixteen, the only Frenchman to reach the finals, and he won a prize even though he was the youngest competitor. In Paris, where he was unanimously awarded First Prize for the Piano at the Conservatoire (in Lucette Descaves’s class) when he gave his first recital, Le Figaro wrote: ‘… Here is an exceptional personality and already much more than a hope: a gold mine’. The International Herald Tribune praised him with these words: ‘… his remarkable technical prowess, but also style and ability to draw his audience into his line of focus and hold it there. Such a quality is the sign of a true artist.’ Twelve years later, in 1980, he made another Liszt recording for Decca, this time of the Italian volume of Années de Pèlerinage. Both recordings are issued as part of this 2CD set, completed with Liszt recordings of both flamboyant pieces – the transcendental study Wilde Jagd, the second Legend ‘St. Francis of Paul walking on the waves’ – as well as the intimate, almost experimental late works. Born in Calcutta, India, of Viennese-Jewish parents, raised in considerable poverty, Jean-Rodolphe Kars was much admired in pianistic circles. Although his upbringing had been that of a secular Jew, he converted, in 1976, to Catholicism and was baptised in 1977. Mysteriously, in 1981, he put an end to his career as a pianist, entering the priesthood in 1986. All these recordings appear internationally on Decca CD for the first time.

Peter Maag (1919-2001) was born in Switzerland to a musical family. After studies in theology and philosophy, and an early career as a pianist, he was encouraged to conduct. In that field, his mentors included Ernest Ansermet and, above all, Wilhelm Furtwängler. His success as a conductor grew throughout the late 1940s and 50s, and as early as 1950 he made his first recordings for Decca. The composer back then was Mozart, and Maag would be associated with Mozart’s music in the recording studios, concert halls and opera houses his entire life. His Decca Mozart recordings were collectors’ items and they have all now appeared on Decca Eloquence.

This 2CD set offers popular 19th-century Romantic fare, with a fairy twist. Nymphs, sylphs and fairies make up the subjects of the Mendelssohn, Chopin and Delibes ballet and incidental music. The swaggering Rossini Overtures recording dates from 1958, and most of the recordings on this collection date from early in the stereo era. They were regarded as sonic showpieces when they were first released, and used copies of the original LPs command high prices from collectors even today. The Chopin and Rossini recordings receive their first international CD release, while the

Delibes is a first ever release on CD.

The Eloquence / Ansermet journey continues with a much-anticipated and unique set: the early Stravinsky/Ansermet Decca discography with recordings made in the decade from 1946 – 1955, with, as a bonus, the hitherto unissued on CD recording of the Divertimento from The Fairy’s Kiss recorded in 1962. The detailed booklet notes by Richard Kaplan are supplemented with full-page reproductions of many of the original LP covers in both, their original form and reissued LP formats. All the recordings appear internationally on Decca CD for the first time.

The two books of Goyescas constitute Granados’s best and most durable, as well as his best-known, music. Subtitled Los majos enamorados (Young men in love) they are highly imaginative transcriptions into music of the tapestries and pictures of Francisco Goya (1746-1828), the wild and demonic genius who with Velasquez is usually thought of as one of the great exemplars of Spanish painting. They were completed in 1911 and first performed by Granados himself in Barcelona on 9 March that year. Publication in 1914 was in two books, the first four pieces in one and the remaining two in a second. Each of the Goyecas has a different dedication: the best-known of them, Quejas ó la Maya y el Ruiseñor, Granados inscribed to his wife Amparo; the others are to the pianists Emil [von] Sauer, Édouard Risler, Ricardo Viñes, Harold Bauer and Alfred Cortot respectively.

Released to mark the centenary of the Georgian-born pianist Nikita Magaloff’s birth, these recordings were made over two periods in Geneva’s Victoria Hall (a hallowed Decca recording venue) – in November 1952 (Book I and El pelele) and October/November 1954 (Book II). This is their first release on Decca CD. Lyndon Jenkins writes the excellent sleeve notes.

Both Pascal Rogé and Lorin Maazel were one of the mainstays of the Decca roster for several years, the former famed for the clarity of his vision in much French music, the latter recording vast tracts of repertoire with both, the Vienna Philharmonic and the Cleveland Orchestra, in often white-hot performances. The Franck Symphony blazes away, with both conviction and sonic distinction. Its original LP coupling, the Variations symphoniques, receives its first international release on CD. And Bartók’s ‘Opus 1’, his Rhapsody for piano and orchestra, which, although a juvenile work, was performed by Bartók all the way through his piano-playing career. It was recorded by Rogé as a companion to his thrilling recordings of the Bartók concertos with Weller and the LPO.

Two beloved Romantic orchestral works in stellar performances, return to the catalogue in beautiful transfers. Pierre Monteux (1875-1964) often bemoaned the fact that he was associated with the French and Russian repertoires, to the exclusion of music from outside of those traditions. He could hardly help it; after all, it was Monteux who conducted the first and famously chaotic performance of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps in 1913. Nevertheless, he recorded all of Beethoven’s symphonies (some of them more than once) and all of Brahms’s, with the exception of the Fourth. He made only one recording of Elgar’s Enigma Variations, and one of the Dvořák Seventh. These came late in his career – 1958 and 1959, respectively – and were the only recordings he made of works by their respective composers. Elgar’s work frequently appeared in the conductor’s concert programs during this ‘Indian summer’. In fact, his last American concerts, in December 1963 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, featured the Enigma Variations, along with works by Vaughan Williams, Beethoven and Sibelius. In his recording of Dvořák’s Seventh, Monteux is clearly responsive to the symphony’s connections with Brahms – a composer for whom he had special affection.

Chopin’s mazurkas are unique in that they occupied him throughout the course of his career as a composer. He wrote nearly sixty of them. The first was written when he was still a teenager, and the last was written in 1849, the year of his death. By the time he had completed the four mazurkas that comprise Op. 6 – the first set to be published during his lifetime – Chopin had already mastered the form; subsequent mazurkas merely confirmed his genius. Pianist Charles Rosen wrote, ‘Of all the short works of Chopin it is the mazurkas that capture the full range of his genius.’

Released to mark the centenary of the Georgian-born pianist Nikita Magaloff’s birth, these recordings were made over a period of seven months (May-November 1956) in Geneva’s Victoria Hall (a hallowed Decca recording venue). This is their first international CD release on Decca. Magaloff recorded the Mazurkas again for Philips several years later, but it is these early Decca recordings that are the most prized.

Kenneth Alwyn was a principal conductor of the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden where he shared the rostrum with such luminaries working with the company at that time as Malcolm Sargent, Ernest Ansermet, Arthur Bliss, William Walton, Hans Werner Henze and Benjamin Britten the latter nominated him as conductor of the original production of The Prince of the Pagodas. In 1958 he was invited by John Culshaw – at short notice – to make Decca’s first stereo recording to launch their new SXL series. Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, which, issued that same year (alongside other popular Tchaikovsky orchestral works) went on to become a bestseller. The next year he was invited back to the studio to make two further records from which his Grieg Peer Gynt Suite No. 1 (with one of the most beautifully-shaped accounts of ‘Morning mood’ to be committed to disc) as well as a selection of Rossini Overtures now appear on CD for the first time. The release was instigated by Alwyn himself and he provides the colourful notes for this release.

In the 1960s and 70s Claudio Abbado made several recordings for Decca – orchestral works by Mendelssohn, Beethoven and Bruckner, as well as 20th-century repertoire by Hindemith, Janácek and Prokofiev. This recording is part of that legacy and there are plenty of magical touches – real swagger in the finale of the Seventh Symphony, dashing humour in the finale of the Eighth, real nobility at the opening of the Creatures of Prometheus Overture. These were the only Beethoven recordings Abbado made for Decca and they are now collected on one CD. The Seventh and the Overture receive their first international release on CD.

The potential of music as a means of adding dignity and grandeur to state occasions has surely been lost on a few rulers in history. Portraits of antique kings and queens are more often admired (or the reverse) for their artistic qualities, as opposed to the enhancement in the status of their subjects they were originally intended to confer. Similarly, the appeal of ceremonial music from former ages is for modern listeners primarily aesthetic.

This 75-minute collection brings together music heard at a staggering variety of British royal occasions. Zadok the Priest has been included in every coronation service held in that building ever since the coronation of King George II and Queen Caroline in Westminster Abbey on 11 October 1727. There is music for the coronation of King James II in 1685 (Purcell’s I was glad), and a later setting of the same verses by Parry for the coronation of Edward VII in Westminster Abbey on 9 August 1902.

Of course, there’s music for Queen Elizabeth II – Walton’s Coronation Te Deum and Orb and Sceptre for the coronation on 2 June 1953 and Bliss’s march Welcome the Queen, which commemorated the return of the monarch from her Commonwealth tour in 1954.

The British national anthem hardly needs an introduction. Benjamin Britten’s distinctive arrangement was first performed in Leeds on 7 October 1961 and has been heard countless times since.

La Traviata – the ultimate opera of love and loss – is a great favourite of opera-goers. To coincide with Opera Australia’s Traviata production in the spectacular setting of “Opera on the Harbour”, Eloquence releases Joan Sutherland’s first recording of La Traviata, complete on 2 CDs. It is for many her greatest recorded portrayal of the doomed heroine Violetta. Her Alfredo is the ‘simply supreme’ (Gramophone) Carlo Bergonzi and Sir John Pritchard conducts a ‘most persuasive, well-balanced and well-timed account’ (Gramophone) of this magnificent opera.