A Report on a Conference Session about the PSO’s Legacy of Recordings
Meeting in Pittsburgh over the past weekend (27–30 May 2015), the Association of Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) offered a two-hour, five-person session called “Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra: Growing Prestige in Steel Town.” The speakers were record buffs extraordinaire, some of them masters at researching the minutiae of discographies and others experienced in sound engineering, record restoration, record production, and record reviewing. Four of the five talks walked through the history of PSO recordings, each illustrated with numerous long excerpts, beginning with the first recording (Reiner and “Ride of the Valkyries”) and ending with the most recent (Honeck and Bruckner 4). The three stars of the afternoon were the PSO itself, the printed discography handed out to the audience, and the revelation of not one but two sources of unpublished recordings.
Twice during the session, first by Seth Winner (the emcee) then by Gary Galo, the PSO was said to have been robbed of a spot among the Big Five American orchestras of the 1950s and ’60s (Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, New York, and Philadelphia). The most interpretive of the presenters, Galo suggested that, unlike Steinberg’s Pittsburghers, Ormandy’s Philadelphians could be “dry” and that Bernstein’s New Yorkers could be “sloppy.”
Dennis Rooney covered the orchestra’s early history and the Reiner recordings, noting that his 1941 recording of Strauss’s Don Juan was the best of its time and was in print for decades. Galo surveyed Steinberg’s Capitol and Everest recordings (1952 to 1960), noting that even in his first recording with the PSO, of Schubert’s “Unfinished” in 1952, the ensemble and intonation are superior to Reiner’s last recordings, and that just five years later, the recording of the Vaughan Williams Tallis Fantasia reveals the strings to have grown in unity and depth of sound. He characterized Steinberg’s aesthetic as exhibiting discipline and embracing a wide repertory, though focusing on Germans, Russians, and concertos. His reputation for being a classicist, Galo said, was misleading; his interpretations are neither aloof nor self-indulgent, but rather intense, dignified, and elastic.
Tom Fine reviewed the recordings on Command (1961 to ’68), a label begun by Enoch Light, who moved the venue from Pittsburgh’s Syria Mosque, with its recessed stage, across the street to Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall, where the stage projects outward from the wall and thus offers a fuller, more reverberant acoustic. To Fine, Steinberg was a no-nonsense student of Toscanini, a perfectionist who took an unusually high number of takes on his recordings, sometimes numbering into the hundreds. Jim North concluded the tour with the post-Steinberg era, with conductors Previn, Maazel, Jansons, the Davis-Tortelier-Janowski trio, and finally Honeck. During this period the recording partners moved to Angel and EMI, then Philips, Sony, an in-house label, Pentatone, Exton, and Reference Recordings. Previn’s choice of recorded repertory excluded Bach, Brahms, and Bruckner, and similarly Maazel’s did not focus on German music, aside from Wagner. The author of thousands of record reviews in Fanfare, North concluded that today’s recordings show the PSO to be performing at its all-time peak.
While listening to the many musical excerpts of these presentations was enjoyable, the take-home treat was the handout of a packed, ten-page discography that greatly augments and corrects the one printed at the back of Play On: An Illustrated History of the Pittsburgh Symphony, by Hax McCullough and Mary Bregnano. Professionally organized, the discography groups the recordings by record label, beginning with Columbia Recordings and ending with the forthcoming release of Richman concertos on Albany Records. Within each label, it lists the matrix numbers (scratched into the vinyl around the label), the corresponding session dates including the day, the composer and title with timing (one piece per line), and the label number, along with select re-releases on LP and CD. The discography will appear in the Spring 2016 issues of the ARSC Journal. (I contributed numerous details to this discography, such as recording dates, timings, forthcoming recordings, proofreading, and further suggestions.) Depending on how you count, there are some 234 recordings (of compositions, not releases) in the official PSO catalog made between March 1940 and February 2015. The discography excludes recordings not released by the PSO in a physical format, such as the bootlegs, radio transcriptions, ephemera, etc., that are listed in the discography on my website.
John Healey gave the greatest surprise of the afternoon when he spoke on rare and little-known transcription recordings of live radio broadcasts from the early 1940s. These recordings are housed partly at the Heinz History Center, the Curtis Institute, and (unmentioned by Healey) the University of Missouri, Kansas City. Though they are not in good condition and the sound quality is somewhat muffled, the recordings offer insight into the orchestra from its earliest days of recording; all but one of them comes from the 1941–42 season and all but one are led by Reiner. The recordings include Rudolf Serkin playing the first Brahms concerto, Smetana’s Bartered Bride overture, Piatigorsky playing the Dvorák concerto, concertmaster Henri Temianka playing a phenomenal Beethoven concerto, Cornelius’s Barber of Baghdad, Hindemith’s News of the Day (a concert version of the opera), Kapell playing the Strauss Burleske, and DeSabata leading the PSO in Strauss’s Don Quixote, with principal cello Aldo Parisot on cello. Temianka’s son (also Piatagorsky’s godson) was recognized among those attending the session. Healey played excerpts of many of these pieces. He did not, however, disclose all such transcription recordings, as another dozen or more are listed among the archives of UMKC (see my discography).
Even more astonishing than Healey’s discoveries, my after-session talk with recording preservation specialist Steve Smolian revealed that there appear to be a handful of previously unidentified recordings of—brace yourself!—the original Pittsburgh Orchestra (1895–1910). These recordings were made in 1903, suggesting that the performances give an excellent flavor of the orchestra under Victor Herbert’s leadership, though Smolian surmises they were not conducted by Herbert. Furthermore, WQED’s Jim Cunningham told me that there are even some transcription records of Klemperer leading the PSO from around 1937. When Smolian’s news is publicly announced, I will report more on these recordings, which together with the Klemperer and the rest now provide an amazing eleven decades of PSO recordings.
