From the archives
Andrew Mcgregor explores Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia’s startlingly varied pre-stereo recordings
The Philadelphia Sound – lush, luxurious, saturated with tone colour, or so Columbia’s marketing people wanted you to believe when you encountered their recordings. And there were so many of them, as this imposing set of the Hungarian conductor Eugene Ormandy – The Columbia Legacy reminds us (Sony 19439757482; 120CDS). These recordings from 1944-58 include 152 new to CD, and 139 receiving their first official releases, all remastered. But check the dates: these are the complete mono recordings, so there's no Ormandy in stereo. Still, this was the American relationship between conductor, orchestra and label that rivalled Karajan in Berlin, and there are such gems as the earliest recordings from 78s of American composers, and a year later distinguished accounts of Brahms and Schumann Piano Concertos with Rudolf Serkin, then the Brahms Violin Concerto with Szigeti, the Dvoˇrák Cello Concerto with Piatigorsky and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with Oscar Levant.
It’s instructive hearing the quality of the Philadelphia players in the ’50s: even in mono there’s a 1955 Stravinsky Rite of Spring that leaps from the speakers, and a fine recording of Prokofiev’s Seventh. Not everything is at this exalted level though; despite the protestations of the well-indexed book in the box, there's some messy Tchaikovsky, some meandering Richard Strauss and Ravel orchestral music that resolutely fails to shimmer. These days you’d probably pass over Ormandy’s big-band Haydn and Mozart, and his Brahms Symphonies can billow unproductively. On the other hand, I enjoyed wallowing in the totally OTT Bach transcriptions.
Ormandy also conducted the Boston Pops Orchestra in lighter fare, their Strauss family can be fun, but the one complete opera recording here, Die Fledermaus, fails to fly. Some of the most intriguing recordings are with guest conductors: Beecham conducting Berners, or Mitropoulos’s Morton Gould.
The presentation is exemplary, with striking original artwork.
Andrew Mcgregor is the presenter of
Radio 3’s Record Review, broadcast each Saturday morning from 9am until 11.45am