above: In Santa Fe's Armory for the Arts, General Leppard commands a motley
recording army.
The Mother of Us All. In recent years, operatic recording in the U.S. has be come fairly well confined to specifically American works: Gershwin's Porgy and Bess ( London), Joplin's Treemonisha (Deutsche Grammophon), Beeson's Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines (RCA). Thanks to its Rock efeller Foundation financing, New World Records has added to that list the Virgil Thomson-Gertrude Stein Mother of Us All (the first complete recording of a Thomson opera), taped late in August 1976 in conjunction with the Santa Fe Opera's production.
Conductor Raymond Leppard and his forces were gathered in Santa Fe's Armory for the Arts, an old National Guard building made available by the state of New Mexico for a variety of local arts activities. For the sessions, the dingy plaster walls of the Armory were festooned in checkerboard fashion with colorful quilts and blankets to secure optimal acoustical ambience. Producer Andrew Raeburn, whose control center (manned by a technical crew from New York and Denver) was a semitrailer van parked alongside the building, planned the miking and "staging" for maximum intelligibility--or at least audibility of the Stein text, and what our correspondent Philip Hart heard suggested considerable success.
The title role--i.e., Susan B. Anthony--was taken by mezzo Mignon Dunn, with mezzos Batyah Godfrey and Helen Vanni and tenor William Lewis accounting for three of the opera's character vignettes. Many of the twenty-five roles were filled by young singers in Santa Fe's apprentice pro gram, whose alumni include Judith Blegen and Sherrill Milnes. The recording reportedly cost close to $100,000, about twice what it would have cost in Europe. But such a recording would not have benefited from the extensive preparation and ensemble spirit of the Santa Fe performances.
The good news for record buyers is that by the time The Mother of Us All is released, early this year, New World will be able to offer it for general sale to the public, along with at least some of the initial releases re viewed in the September 1976 issue. (Under the original contractual arrangements, they could be offered only to educational institutions.)
Haydn symphonies. Neville Marriner and the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields are engaged in a series of sym phony recordings for Philips. Instead of grouping by number, the Marriner couplings will play on nicknames: The Philosopher with The Schoolmaster, Mercury with Fire, Oxford with London, Miracle with Surprise, Maria Theresia with La Reine, Military with Drum Roll, and so on. (Marriner and the Academy are also accompanying Pepe Romero in the four Giuliani guitar concertos for Philips.)
With La Reine, of course, Marriner ventures into the six " Paris" sym phonies (from which The Hen and The Bear might logically go together). That may raise eyebrows at EMI, which seems to have staked a proprietary claim to Symphonies Nos. 82-87: Within a period of months, EMI has released two complete cycles, by Yehudi Menuhin and the Menuhin Festival Orchestra and by Daniel Barenboim and the English Chamber Orchestra. Angel so far has no definite plans for releasing either.
Project Boris II. It is nearly fourteen years since these pages carried then-editor Roland Gelatt's extended re port on EMI's monumental "Project Boris," the first stereo recording of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov. Though we now have four stereo versions, all are based on Rimsky-Korsakov's revision. After years of unfulfilled rumors, EMI has once again jumped into the breach, sending producer David Mottley, balance engineer Michael Gray, and its own recording equipment to Katowice, Poland, to collaborate with Polish Radio on the long-awaited re corded premiere of Mussorgsky's own text.
Why Katowice? It is the home of what Mottley rates the best orchestra in Poland, the Polish Radio Sym phony, which he first recorded in 1972 in a pair of "Penderecki Conducts Penderecki" discs. More recently he recorded Penderecki's Magnijlcat, using the excellent radio choruses of Katowice and nearby Cracow. They were again on hand for Boris, which was conducted by the Polish -born conductor of the St. Louis Symphony, Jerzy Semkow.
Also familiar to American audiences is the recording's protagonist, for Martti Talvela first sang Boris in the Mussorgsky text in the Metropoli tan Opera's 1975 production. He still had a fair amount of music to learn, as the recording apparently combines Mussorgsky's two versions differently from the Met's hybrid edition. (The score used was David Lloyd-Jones's critical edition, just published by Ox ford University Press, which includes all the material of both Mussorgsky versions.) The other bass principals were the Pole Andre Mroz as Pimen and the Norwegian Aage Haugland ( Covent Garden's Hunding this past fall) as Varlaam. As Dmitri, Nicolai Gedda repeated the role of his first international recording back in 1952, when Walter Legge plucked the debutant tenor off the stage of Stock holm's Royal Opera for EMI's first Boris. Appropriately enough, the cast included a Polish Marina, the mezzo soprano Bozena Kinasz.
Organizing the necessary large cast and using a brand-new score made this an especially complex project, but producer Mottley told HF European editor Edward Greenfield that the eagerness with which his Polish collaborators helped to sort out con fusions made all the difference. (Other Eastern European regimes please note.)
Together again. Veteran cohorts Joan Sutherland and Marilyn Horne have been reunited in the recording studio, in a vehicle far removed from their bel canto specialties: Il Trovatore. Azucena is Home's first Verdi operatic role on records; Leonora is Sutherland's third, but the first in spinto ter ritory. The Manrico was Luciano Pavarotti (who would shortly open the Metropolitan Opera season in the same role); Ingvar Wixell sang Di Luna. Richard Bonynge conducted London's National Philharmonic Orchestra for both Trovatore (whose Paris -added ballet music was re corded) and a Sutherland/Pavarotti duet disc (Traviata, Aida, Otello, and Linda di Chamounix) made at the same time.
Second time around. Colin Davis' current recording schedule includes remakes of several major works he first recorded early in his career. Recently, for example, he chose Berlioz' Symphonie fantastique--one of his early-Sixties triumphs with the London Symphony-for his first recording with the Concertgebouw Orchestra. Now Davis has returned to Amsterdam to replace another LSO performance: Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. He is also recording Haydn's Symphonies Nos. 102 and 103 with the Concertgebouw.
One of Davis' earliest Berlioz projects-dating back more than fifteen years and predating his association with Philips--was L'Enfance du Christ for L’Oiseau-Lyre. Now L'Enfance will be added to the conductor's Philips Berlioz cycle. The soloists are Janet Baker, Eric Tappy, and Jules Bastin, with the John Alldis Choir and the London Symphony.
Boulez in London. Pierre Boulez too has been recording Berlioz. For CBS he has taped Les Nuits d'ete with the BBC Symphony and soloists Yvonne Minton and Stuart Burrows. Boulez and the BBC Symphony have also re corded Schoenberg's Survivor from Warsaw, as yet uncoupled. As soloist Boulez chose Gunter Reich (the Speaker of his Gurre-Lieder and the Moses of his Moses and Aron), presumably on the grounds that his lightly German-accented English would sound more authentic.
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(High Fidelity, Jan. 1977)
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