Barber - Two Premiere Recordings, and a Bonus

My main blog recently recognized the composer Samuel Barber with a post of many first recordings, including the set of his 1950 Decca-London recordings.

Today we'll go back to two of Barber's initial successes, including his most famous work, the Adagio for Strings, in their own first recordings. And we'll end with a vintage recording of his earliest success, the School for Scandal Overture.

The Adagio for Strings and the second item on the program, Barber's Essay for Orchestra, were introduced in the same 1938 concert by the most famous conductor of the day, Arturo Toscanini, with his NBC Symphony. New York Times critic Olin Downes was taken with both the music and the performances:

Arturo Toscanini

"It goes without saying that Toscanini conducted these scores as if his reputation rested upon the results. He does that with whatever he undertakes. Mr. Barber had reason for thankfulness for a premier under such leadership. And the music proved eminently worth playing. The Adagio for the strings, particularly, is the work of a young musician of true talent, rapidly increasing skill, and, one would infer, capacity for self-criticism. It is not pretentious music. Its author does not pose and posture in his score. He writes with a definite purpose, a clear objective and a sense of structure...

"The Essay for Orchestra, modestly named, is well integrated, with clear instrumentation, and with development of the ideas that unifies the music in spite of changes of tempo and marked contrasts of orchestration. The Adagio impressed this chronicler, at the first hearing, as the better composition of the two, but it would be premature to put this down as a definite conclusion, and it is a matter of secondary importance. Of the first importance is the fact of a composer who is attempting no more than he can do, and doing that genuinely, and well." The complete review is in the download.

The Adagio is an arrangement of the slow movement from Barber's String Quartet, Op. 11. Toscanini was to record the orchestrated Adagio in 1942 with the NBC orchestra, thankfully in Carnegie Hall rather than the notorious Studio 8H, where they broadcasted. The Adagio has been called "the saddest music ever written," which it is not, and certainly not in this perfect performance.

Samuel Barber and Eugene Ormandy, circa 1970s

The Essay for Orchestra, Op. 12, is generally called the Essay No. 1 today because the composer was to write two others. Its first recording was not by Toscanini, but by one of the other pre-eminent conductors of the time, Eugene Ormandy, with the Philadelphia Orchestra. That session, also for Victor, was in 1940. Ormandy was not particularly known as an advocate of the composer - in the recording studio, he did not return to Barber's music until 1957 - but this early recording is splendid, with brilliant playing by the Philadelphians.

Howard Hanson

The Ormandy disc of the Essay was the first of any Barber composition, followed by Werner Janssen's recording of the School for Scandal Overture, which took place in March 1942, just a week before Toscanini's session. I don't have that Janssen record, but the score is memorable - like the Adagio, the Essay and the other works I posted recently. So I can't resist adding a version of it to this post. It is actually the third recording, dating from 1952 and by Howard Hanson and the Eastman-Rochester Symphony Orchestra in their long series of modern American music recordings.

Barber wrote the School for Scandal Overture in 1932 as his senior thesis at the Curtis Institute. It was done in the spirit of the 1777 Richard Brinsley Sheridan comedy of manners, but not for any production. The music is exhilarating. Hanson's performance is not as polished as the Toscanini and Ormandy, but still good.

The sound on all records is in excellent ambient stereo. The Essay and School for Scandal Overture come from my collection; the Adagio was cleaned up from an Internet Archive needle drop.

A Glinka Favorite from Philadelphia and Boston

The overture to Mikhail Glinka's opera Ruslan and Ludmila is one of the great program openers, beloved of maestros who want to stun the audience with orchestral viruosity. And two of the great virtuoso ensembles of all time are those of Philadelphia and Boston, and they do indeed amaze in these vintage recordings led by Eugene Ormandy and Arthur Fiedler, respectively.

The young Fiedler

The earlier of the two is from 1939 and is devoted to the Boston Pops, then in the ninth year of Fiedler's 49-year reign. Victor issued the performance on two sides of a Red Seal 78.

The Philadelphia Orchestra version comes from 1946, when Ormandy was eight years into his 44-year tenure as music director. He had recently moved over from Victor to Columbia, which issued this endeavor on its own 78.

The Boston performance is perhaps the more lithe; the Philadelphians were unrivalled in the depth of their string tone, which has an intoxicating effect in the overture's rapid string figurations. 

I do prefer the Fiedler, perhaps because it is much better recorded and because the pressing at hand is far superior. Either way, I am sure you will enjoy the experience.

Ormandy as the Phantom of the Orchestra

Waltzing with Ormandy and Jim Flora

I have to admit I chose this item more for the cover than for the music - although the sounds are good, too. The artwork is by the famously quirky Jim Flora, who designed albums from RCA Victor and Columbia in the 1940s and 1950s. This EP is circa 1954.

Here we have one of the rarer covers, I think - it's to an EP of waltzes from the Philadelphia Orchestra and Eugene Ormandy, and as far as I know does not correspond to an LP cover (I could be wrong). Although the cover is not signed, it is certainly Flora, whose bizarre style is unmistakable, although sometimes imitated at the time. (More about Flora here. Plenty of merchandise - you can even get Flora wallpaper, should you want his strange creatures to be your constant companions during your leisure hours.)

Jim Flora

The main item on the EP is the waltz sequence from Richard Strauss' opera Der Rosenkavalier. On the cover, Flora depicts a suitably rose-colored knight sniffing rather than proffering the rose, while Sophie could not be less impressed.

As always with the Philadelphians, the performance is both immaculate and delightful, although lacking any touch of decadence. The fill-up is a fine performance of the waltz from Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings.

I think these performances date from April 1946 (Tchaikovsky) and November 1947 (Strauss), although the ensemble also recorded them in 1952. I say that because there seems to be some added reverb, which was Columbia's habit with reissues of the period; also there is very little signal above 10kHz, unlikely for a 1952 recording. Also, the Michael Gray discography claims the 1952 Serenade for Strings was never issued.