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‘Columbia Legacy’ Review: Conducting History


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A Sony Classical collection of 120 CDs explores the influential early sound of Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, from the 1930s through the ‘50s.

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Conductor Eugene Ormandy rehearsing with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1949

Photo: Getty Images
 

There has never been a better time to buy reissued classical music recordings from the 20th century. Within the past decade, more-or-less complete sets of the performances of Herbert von Karajan, Leonard Bernstein, Fritz Reiner, Charles Munch and other legends, as well as most of the leading soloists of their times, have been remastered in gleaming sound by the companies for which they recorded.

Reissues have long been particularly profitable for record companies. There are no new studio costs to pay, only some residuals to the artist (or, more likely, the artist’s estate), remastering charges and, in the case of orchestral music, a possible fee to whatever musicians’ union applies. In a time when a new recording of, say, the nine Beethoven symphonies might cost more than a million dollars to make, past performances, all paid for, are money in the company nest egg.

Perennial bestsellers Maria Callas and Glenn Gould continue to receive handsome reissues every few years, with new discoveries added to the trove each time, and there are now comprehensive boxes dedicated to hundreds of admirable but lesser-known artists. A few of these endeavors have bordered on mania. Take the Venias reissue, a few years back, of 12 performances that the German conductor Hans Knappertsbusch led of Wagner’s “ Parsifal ” at the Bayreuth Festival between 1951 and 1954—all in one 48-CD set!

Now Sony Classical has begun a thorough collection of the recordings Eugene Ormandy made with the Philadelphia Orchestra. The first volume, “Columbia Legacy,” was released in April and is already going into its second pressing, with two further offerings in the planning stages. Ormandy was associated with the Philadelphians for 44 years, from 1936 until 1980: The present set, recorded in monaural sound, takes us only to the end of the 1950s, but contains 120 CDs. There exist some 65-year-old high-fidelity recordings that sound as though they could have been made yesterday. While none of those are in the box, the recordings it does contain are never difficult to listen to, and the lush “Philadelphia sound” comes through.

Ormandy was in his mid-30s when he took over the orchestra. He recognized immediately what an extraordinary ensemble he had inherited from Leopold Stokowski, who had been there since 1912. Most other celebrated conductors have been pianists or violinists (Ormandy played both instruments). Stokowski was an organist and he led his orchestra with an organist’s sensibility. To call him a wizard seems grandiloquent, and yet the word fit exactly. He was the figurative “man behind the curtain,” controlling the magic expertly, calibrating every effect, every new sonic color, until the 100-odd players seemed to become a single instrument of infinite variety.

The younger man may not have had Stokowski’s originality, but he was a steady, schooled and highly versatile musician, devoted to the orchestra. In the days before maestros spent most of their time on airplanes traveling from one musical capital to another, he lived in Philadelphia—in the grand old Bellevue-Stratford Hotel a block away from the Academy of Music—and could be found there most of the year. Throughout the 1950s, Ormandy-Philadelphia sold more recordings in America than any other such team.

His tastes, especially during the time chronicled here, were decidedly middle of the road. The standard repertory is reasonably well-represented: six Haydn symphonies (but surprisingly little Mozart, which the label mostly allotted to the Viennese Bruno Walter ), several Beethoven symphonies (a fleet and exciting Seventh stands out) as well as all five piano concertos, several hours of Brahms, the most familiar symphonies by Franck, Saint-Saëns and Tchaikovsky. The Philadelphia Orchestra was renowned especially for its string sound, full-throated but impeccably elegant, and for the quality of its first-desk players, memorable soloists in their own right.

Setting aside Sibelius, Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Copland, whose work was already ensconced in the repertory, it is startling to contemplate how many other then-living composers enjoyed a solid popular following. Paul Hindemith, Arthur Honegger, Aram Khachaturian, Dmitry Kabalevsky, and Darius Milhaud are all here, in lively and fastidious performances. Musical politics may have played a part in some of the recording choices, although it is no insult to the quality of their works to note that William Schuman was already the president of New York’s Juilliard School and would soon become the first president of Lincoln Center, or that Virgil Thomson was the most respected classical music critic of his time.

And local sentiment surely had something to do with the choice of music by Harl McDonald, who served as the orchestra’s manager, and by Louis Gesensway, a member of the violin section for almost 50 years. (The latter’s “Four Squares of Philadelphia” is a slight, charming valentine to the city where he spent his life.) Ormandy had a special fondness for the work of Richard Yardumian, who flavored his mostly conservative music with Armenian modes and melodies. Yardumian, also a Philadelphian, was the orchestra’s composer laureate from 1949 to 1964 and was honored with nine world premieres and four albums, three of which have been left for another set.

It is not mere historical duty that is inspiring all these reissues from the big companies. Copyright law varies around the world, but in many countries recordings lose their protection after 50 years (the U.S. provides for longer, but that is hardly guaranteed indefinitely). The clock is ticking and there is a reason that we are getting sets of conductors from the 1960s and 1970s such as Morton Gould, Jean Martinon and Georges Pretre before they go into public domain, rather than collections from older masters such as Serge Koussevitzky and—for that matter—the early Stokowski recordings, on which time has mostly run out.

All that said, it is a pleasure to have such a carefully restored and beautifully packaged set as this first volume of “Columbia Legacy.” Ormandy continued to grow through the years: He would become a persuasive Shostakovich interpreter and made the first recordings of several of the late symphonies. And fittingly for the person who made the first major Mahler recording in the U.S. (Symphony No. 2, “Resurrection” with the Minneapolis Symphony), he returned to the composer in late life and recorded the first “complete” performance of the Symphony No. 10, which Mahler had left unfinished. There is much to enjoy here, but I’m already looking forward to Volume Two.

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