STOKOWSKI Falla: El Amor Brujo, Noches en los jardines de España (1948/49) - PASC174

Stokowski sets de Falla on fire!

Stunning live performances full of Spanish passion

"Here, perhaps goaded by the presence of an audience, is Stokowski at his most fiery, with a soloist who can handle whatever is thrown at her without resorting to the crudities that sometimes pass for earthy “passion.” If anything, I would have preferred a bit more poise from the podium, but it’s certainly an intense, driving performance that never loses tension and the orchestra really digs in and plays for him...

“Respectable” would be a tame description for the Kapell/Stokowski Nights. Once again, Stokowski seems charged with energy and, once again, has a soloist who can do more than merely keep up with him... A previous CD issued by the Japan Leopold Stokowski Society was listenable (especially if you liked this performance), but was marred by some scratchy surfaces that were on the original transcriptions. This one is a bit brighter and yet minimizes the noise, giving new life to an exciting glimpse of the past..." - James Miller, Fanfare Jan/Feb 2010

Stokowski performed El Amor Brujo four times with the New York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra - once on 5th January, 1947, and then in three concert in March 1948 (18th, 19th and 21st) - and in each concert the soloist was the mezzo-soprano Nan Merriman. This recording is taken from the last of those concerts; when one hears the intensity and passion that both soloist and musicians bring to this performance, it's tempting to believe they had distilled all the energy of the previous concerts into this one final outing.

I've listened to a number of recordings of the same work whilst preparing this restoration and none has the power, passion, and dark Spanish gypsy magic that I find here in this sensational and riveting performance - as perfectly demonstrated in our sample excerpt on this page, Song of Love's Sorrow. I can only believe that this captivating recording has remained unissued due to the sonic shortcomings of the original recording - shortcomings that only a remastering technique such as Pristine's XR process can really tackle.

This remastering was sourced from open-reel tapes compiled by Stokowski's assistant, Jack Baumgarten. Both concerts had originally been captured on disc, and both exhibited unusual sonic deficiencies - the tape box has the words "unfocussed sound" pencilled in next to the details of El amor brujo, which is no great surprise as my XR remastering revealed a loss of up to 20dB between 3 and 5kHz, as well as a 15dB drop centred around 550Hz, both of which sucked a huge amount of life out of the recording. A similar frequency loss, about 18dB, was noted above about 4.5kHz in Nights in the Gardens of Spain, leaving a very muffled top end.

Restoring these missing frequencies brought both recordings very much to life - the transformation of the first in particular was truly remarkable - but also then required considerable noise reduction targeted at those same frequency ranges as bringing up the music has inevitably also amplified the tape hiss. Both recordings then required extensive close attention to deal with individual defects now revealed by the severe re-equalisation required. The end results do, I hope, speak for themselves, as do these two absolutely wonderful performances.

Andrew Rose