A fabulous Falstaff; Mitch Miller shines in Vaughan Williams
Superb previously unissued live broadcast recording from Anglophile Herrmann
This fascinating recording comes from the archives of
Edward Johnson. It dates from precisely one week after the surrender of
Japan brought the Second World War to an end, and in Bernard Herrmann
and Mitch Miller features two artists who would go on to become major
names in their respective fields - Herrmann as a hugely successful and
influential film composer, and Miller as one of the major movers and
shakers in the music industry. Herrmann was a passionate Anglophile,
which perhaps explains the programme here, and he and Miller had given
the US première of Vaughan Williams' Oboe Concerto three months prior to
this broadcast.
The present recording had previously been very well
dubbed onto high quality 1/4" tape from what sound like excellent
acetate discs for this era. For much of the recording the disc origin of
the recording is hard to detect, with very little surface noise.
However there are some areas where surface clicks and the occasional
swish may be detected, though these have been kept to a minimum.
The recording is technically notable for its wide
dynamic and frequency range, with a particularly well-extended treble
for this era. I have retained announcements as broadcast, as well as
including a short section of the start of the news broadcast, for
historical interest.
Andrew Rose
-
HANDEL Water Music Suite (arr. Harty)
- VAUGHAN WILLIAMS Concerto for Oboe and Strings in A minor
-
ELGAR Falstaff, Op. 68
CBS Broadcast, Sunday 9th September 1945
Introduced by Sidney Berry
Brief extract from the news read by Bern Bennett
A CBS live radio broadcast, 9th September 1945, introduced by Sidney Berry, from the archive of Edward Johnson
Transfers and XR remastering by Andrew Rose at Pristine Audio, November 2009
Cover artwork based on a photograph of Bernard Herrmann
Total duration: 75:50
BERNARD HERRMANN
conducts English and American Music
The
death of Bernard Herrmann on Christmas Eve, 1975, in Hollywood,
deprived the film and music worlds of one of their most outspoken,
colourful and talented personalities. It is true that his choleric
personality and abrasiveness were not exactly endearing but in the words
of one who was close to him, he was like
‘
a toffee-apple, all crusty on the outside and soft on the inside’.
“
Benny,”
to his friends, was born in New York City in 1911 and showed an
interest in music at an early age. After graduating he went to New York
University and later became a student at the Juilliard School of Music.
His career took a professional turn when he went to work for the
Columbia Broadcasting System in 1933. He soon made his mark on their
radio programmes, planning them in an unconventional way and featuring
rarely heard music seldom played in public concert halls. One American
composer whom Herrmann championed for many years was Charles Ives,
several of whose works received their premieres under his direction.
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Always
an ardent anglophile, Herrmann presented a great deal of English music
on the CBS network, introducing compositions by Vaughan Williams, Bax,
Delius, Cyril Scott and many others.
Indeed, when Herrmann became Conductor-in-Chief of the Columbia Symphony Orchestra in 1940,
Baker’s Musical Dictionary
noted that
he was ‘probably responsible for introducing more new works to American radio audiences than any other conductor.’
By 1948 he had also earned a chapter in David Ewen’s
Dictators of the Baton
in which the author commented on Herrmann’s ‘lack of attention to detail’ but concluded:
‘
Whatever
his faults as a conductor may be, it cannot be denied that he is a
splendid musician, that he has an enthusiasm which is found contagiously
in his performances, and that with his detestation of the stereotyped
he has been one of the most invigorating influences in the radio music
of the past two decades.'
Although
he was busy championing the music of others, he did not neglect his own
composing career and by the late 1940s several of his concert works had
received notable performances. Barbirolli had conducted his Cantata
Moby Dick
with
the New York Philharmonic in 1940 and his Symphony was performed by the
same orchestra under Howard Barlow in 1942.That same year Beecham
conducted the CBS Symphony in the suite
Welles Raises Kane
.
The Devil and Daniel Webster
Suite
was given its concert premiere by Ormandy and his Philadelphians in
1944 and was taken up by Stokowski and the New York Philharmonic in
1949.
After
the war, Herrmann made many guest appearances in British concert halls
and in 1950 completed work on his most ambitious composition, the
windswept lyric-drama
Wuthering Heights
. This was a project which had occupied him for three years and reflected his wide literary tastes.
In
1951 after the CBS Symphony Orchestra was disbanded, he spent more time
in England, where he eventually settled. In 1956 he conducted the
London Symphony Orchestra in two broadcasts, one of which included the
British premiere of Charles Ives’s
Second Symphony
(
PASC 232
)
and Elgar’s
Falstaff
,
a
particular Herrmann favourite. He considered it to be Elgar’s ‘supreme
orchestral work’ and it was one that he also performed in his CBS days (
PASC 202
).
As
time went on his public appearances became less frequent, the last of
them taking place at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in 1974, when he
conducted the Royal Philharmonic in a Byron Commemoration Concert
featuring music by Berlioz, Liszt, Richard Arnell and Elizabeth
Maconchy.
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Bernard
Herrmann’s own concert works haven't really established themselves in
the regular repertoire but his name is still kept firmly in the public
eye by the many films for which he wrote the music. Quite a few of these
appear on TV from time to time and there is no doubt that it was in
this sphere of composition he was at his best.
He was introduced to the world of motion picture music by Orson Welles, for whose
Mercury Theatre Playhouse
Herrmann
had written background scores in his early CBS radio days. When Welles
moved from broadcasting to the cinema he took his Mercury Theatre
colleagues with him and made
Citizen Kane
.
This was Herrmann’s first film music assignment and it set him on a second career which he pursued to the end of his life.
One
of the most notable director/composer collaborations in cinema history
began in 1955 when Bernard Herrmann wrote the score for
The Trouble with Harry
, the first of several Alfred Hitchcock films on which he was to work. His second Hitchcock film was a splendid remake of
The Man Who Knew Too Much
and
included Herrmann’s only screen appearance. This occurs in the famous
Albert Hall sequence marking the film’s climax and featured the London
Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in Arthur Benjamin’s
Storm Clouds Cantata
, the same music that had been heard in Hitchcock’s earlier version of the story in 1934.
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Quite the most celebrated of Herrmann’s film scores, however, is the one he wrote for Hitchcock’s
Psycho
in
1960. Using a large string orchestra and employing every trick in the
string-player’s book he complemented the hard black-and-white images
with a similarly monochrome score. His music for the shower murder, with
its frenzied bird-like shrieks from the violins, was something quite
new in movie music history and has been much imitated ever since.
His break with Hitchcock came after
Marnie
,
owing
to the studio’s insistence that in common with the then-current vogue
in film music, all movies should have a hit-parade “pop” tune to help
sell the picture. Herrmann demurred and instead wrote a dramatic score
that Hitchcock completely rejected. The resulting break in their
relationship caused others to provide the scores for Hitchcock's
subsequent films. As it happens, these did not match Herrmann’s for
memorability, nor were they especially helpful in box-office terms.
The lucrative profession of writing music for the movies undoubtedly helped to finance the recording of
Wuthering Heights
which
Bernard Herrmann undertook in 1966 and which began yet another phase in
his career – a considerable amount of work in the recording studios. He
not only recorded much of his own concert hall music but also suites
and excerpts from a number of his film scores. Sadly, however, there was
a general slowing down of tempi in his final years due to increasing
ill-health. Even so, many of his later recordings, both on Unicorn and
in Decca's 'Phase-4 Stereo' series, were well-received. In particular,
his concert suite from
The Three Worlds of Gulliver
is
one of the most enjoyable scores he ever wrote, whilst his championship
of other composers’ film music - notably Shostakovich's
Hamlet
and Constant Lambert’s
Anna Karenina
- was rewarded by excellent performances.
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As
an advocate of the lesser-known works of infrequently performed
composers, he must have been pleased at the reception given to his
recording of Raff’s
Lenore Symphony
. In
Records and Recording
,
Geoffrey Crankshaw wrote that 'the whole work is replete with vitality
and Bernard Herrmann conducts it with immense zest, giving it a
tremendous performance which is matched by a superb recording.’
The
two CDs issued by Pristine, from studio broadcasts which feature
Herrmann's championship of English and American music respectively, each
have the 'zest and vitality' that characterises the best of his
commercial recordings. In his MusicWeb International review of each CD
on their initial release, Rob Barnett wrote that Herrmann's was a 'very
fine reading' of the Ives 2nd Symphony and he also found much to enjoy
in Robert Russell Bennett's Violin Concerto: 'Tuneful, jazzy, a touch of
Broadway here, a slice of Walton there.'
He
was equally taken with the all-English collection, noting that soloist
Mitch Miller's contribution to the Vaughan Williams Oboe Concerto was
'dignified and forthright.' He also praised Herrmann's performance of
Elgar's
Falstaff
:
'Moods, episodes and interludes are vividly painted and character leaps
out at the listener. Elgarians must hear this.' In these two
compendiums, Herrmann enthusiastically championed the music of composers
he specially admired, so they would surely be welcome additions to any
collections that feature his own celebrated movie music.
Edward Johnson
Abridged and adapted from "Bernard Herrmann: Hollywood's Music Dramatist" (Triad Press: published 1977)
