Photo: Alamy.
Sir Edward Elgar recording acoustically – via horn – in 1914.
The first recording device that I came in contact with was my father’s wire recorder, a machine that seemed pretty magical to me. To make his recordings more accessible and “permanent,” he would take special ones to a place in New York City to have them made into records. That’s how I eventually ended up with “The Birth of Willie,” which in turn I had made into a cassette tape. And now of course, no one uses cassette tapes. That’s the trouble with new technologies. You put heart and soul into an artifact and then it goes obsolete.
In today’s article from Gramophone, Bob Cowan gets a bit into the weeds with the attributes and strengths of various early recordings.
“Back in the May edition of my Replay column, under the heading ‘Electric centenary’, I offered an enthusiastic welcome to Pristine Audio’s release ‘1925: Landmarks from the Dawn of Electrical Recording’. On this set, producer and audio restoration engineer Mark Obert-Thorn has programmed two CDs’ worth of recordings, principally from that epoch-making year when for the most part a microphone took over from purely mechanical recording, in other words from a pre-electric recording horn (where the sound is transmitted on to the master grooves with no electronics involved). The ascent from one method to the other was more significant even than the later leaps from wax cylinder to flat disc, shellac to vinyl, mono to stereo, analogue to digital or CD to streaming.
“The electrical breakthrough (from acoustic, horn-recorded sound) had one thing in common with the advent of stereo: it necessitated, for the full effect of the newer system to register, the acquisition of fully up-to-date reproducing equipment. You can’t play a stereo LP with a mono-only tone arm; likewise, reproducing electrically recorded 78s on even the most sophisticated of horn gramophones keeps the dynamic ‘realism’ of an electrical recording at bay, although the human voice or even the most distinctive solo (stringed) instrument can, at best, remain more or less intact.
Arthur Rubinstein, who never left us any horn gramophone recordings, always maintained that the mechanical horn recording system made the piano sound like a banjo. …
“Eliminating resonances from the horn and producing clearer sound with a wider frequency range via the electrical system works especially well with a piano, while it goes without saying that orchestral music benefits enormously after the cavernous horn’s obvious limitations.
“There are, however, a few notable exceptions, principally Sergey Rachmaninov playing his own Prelude in C sharp minor, also known as ‘The Bells of Moscow’, which calls on the composer’s firm, commanding touch (especially strong at the bass end of the keyboard) and suspenseful sense of timing. He recorded it three times, twice acoustically (April 1919 and October 1921) and once electrically (April 1928), and all three versions are included in RCA’s 10-disc set ‘Sergei Rachmaninoff: The Complete Recordings’. Pianists such as Alfred Cortot (with his bel canto top line) and Benno Moiseiwitsch (whose style incorporates the projection of countless simultaneous subsidiary voices) managed to circumvent the horn recording system in ways that other pianists, even the best of them, rarely could; however, Rachmaninov playing Rachmaninov is special: it has listeners poised at a crossroads between passion and foreboding, whether he was recording acoustically or electrically. …
“The great British-born American conductor Leopold Stokowski, who knew Rachmaninov well and recorded with him both acoustically and electrically, made his first discs with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1917 – though, as the Stokowski guru Edward Johnson has noted, ‘Between 1917 and 1924, they made an estimated 450 acoustic recordings, but the old method of playing into a large horn gave a very poor representation of orchestral sound, and of all their acoustic discs, only 60 or so were actually issued.’
“Listening to Stokowski’s acoustic recordings of music from Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sheherazade, specifically ‘The Young Prince and Young Princess’ (recorded 1921), is instructive. The acoustic version (now on Pristine Audio, alongside another excerpt recorded in 1919) sounds as if it’s being played by a chamber ensemble with bongos, whereas by the time the complete work was recorded in 1927, captured on wax, Stokowski’s characteristic Philadelphian opulence could be reproduced with impressive realism. …
“Sir Edward Elgar’s acoustic recordings of his own music enshrine riveting performances that often generate newsreel-style excitement (even though Fritz Kreisler said, on at least one occasion, that Elgar was a ‘lousy conductor’), but the horn loses the subtler aspects of the composer’s orchestration. …
“Among the most notable ‘Elgar conducts Elgar’ comparisons concerns the Violin Concerto, recorded acoustically in 1916 with the Edwardian virtuoso Marie Hall as soloist, then, most famously, electrically in 1932 with the teenage Yehudi Menuhin. The earlier version crams about a third of the concerto onto four 78rpm sides, making a significant alteration to the scoring by adding a harp to the strummed cadenza, which doesn’t exactly bolster the music’s shimmering sense of mystery (Elgar apparently rewrote his cadenza so that the recording horn could pick it up). Hall, a good, lusty player who was historically significant, can’t match the burning infatuation with the music that Menuhin conveys, seemingly with total ease. …
“Over the years, much confusion has accumulated about the identity of the first Beethoven Fifth Symphony on disc, which was long thought to be a highly individual reading by the Berlin Philharmonic under Arthur Nikisch, recorded in Berlin on November 10, 1913. Then informed pundits revealed that it was preceded in 1910 by a recording featuring a ‘string orchestra’ (a mysterious and inaccurate attribution) allegedly under one Friedrich Kark (1869-1939), who was conductor of the Hamburg Opera House from 1906 to 1918 and also set down the first Pastoral Symphony with the same orchestra during the same year. …
“A rather blurrily recorded Furtwängler Fifth with the Berlin Philharmonic was set down in October (16th and 30th) 1926 and January 1927. You can catch it on YouTube transferred from an ultra-rare set of 78rpm discs issued in the US on the Brunswick label. Although, in terms of its date, it falls securely within the remit of electrical sound, it comes across like a boxy-sounding acoustic production. I can’t say for sure which side of the divide this 1926-27 recording falls. The same conductor’s Berlin Fifth from 1937 (Warner) is superior in all respects. …
“In December 1920, Arturo Toscanini brought the La Scala Orchestra to the US on a concert tour and it was then that he made his first recordings for Victor. This impressive showing of material has been released as Volume 71 of RCA’s ‘Arturo Toscanini Collection’ and proves beyond reasonable doubt that with this orchestra in Camden, New Jersey, Toscanini upped the standard of orchestral playing on disc a good few notches higher than had been achieved elsewhere. The finale of Beethoven’s Fifth (1920) displays an orchestra at the top of its game.”
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