What strikes me about this recording is not just the excellent Mozart playing, but the clarity of all the voices. It is beautifully played and beautifully engineered. My father's arpeggiated figures that serve as accompaniment to melodies in the other instruments act like the left hand of a pianist (the superior left hand of Claude Frank, to be exact), being both extremely even and extremely directional, like calm fingers of a potter working on a wheel, allowing for evenly controlled shapes to appear. It is extremely satisfying Mozart playing.
The Quintet for Piano and Winds is really interesting to hear. After listening to Sherman Walt yesterday, the pedestal I made for him in my mind and heart has gotten still taller. What remarkable bassoon playing! What remarkable musicianship! Every single note and every single phrase seems to be more beautiful and more expressive than the last. And Ralph Gomberg is hand-in-glove with Walt. It is lovely oboe playing that somehow, while always being expressive and oboistic, never seems to dominate.
I'm not so impressed with Gino Cioffi's clarinet playing. It is fine during tutti sections, but when the clarinet has solo passages, his sound is thin and unsatisfying. When Harold Wright joined the Boston Symphony and the Boston Symphony Chamber Players in 1970, the "value" of the ensemble went up exponentially.
I love hearing James Stagliano's colorful and beautiful French Horn playing. He retired from the Boston Symphony in 1973. The recordings in this set might be his last chamber music recordings.
You can order the set, which just came out last week, here.
2 comments:
A few nods of (mostly) assent:
1. As to the sound quality of these early BSCP recordings: you do well to note it; the producers were either Richard Mohr and Lewis Layton or their acolytes from the golden age at RCA.
2. Firth was a truly outstanding tympanist--both in chamber music and with the BSO. Even the miserable acoustics of Berkeley's Zellerbach hall could not make any less arresting his contributions to a BSCP performance of L'Histoire du Soldat. And in the 70's and 80's, when Klaus Tennstedt used to barnstorm through Tanglewood, he and Firth thrillingly showed how Beethoven symphonies were constructed from the tympani upwards.
3. As to Claude Frank's left hand: it, along with his right hand, was trained by Schnabel; it is remarkable to realize that a pupil of Schnabel performed well into the stereo--indeed, digital--era. (Side note: if Schnabel thought that people would still be listening to his records 90 years later, he would have done a few more retakes.)
4. I've always loved Sherm Walt's characterful bassoon playing and rounded tone; I remember finding Doriot Anthony Dwyer's flute playing to be a bit cool, preferring James Pappoutsakis.
Thank you, David!
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