Parnassus Blog

"The Indispensible Man" plays the worst concert ever

2008-03-05T09:08:00.000-08:00

Reading William Kristol's column about William F. Buckley, Jr. ("The Indispensable Man") in Monday's New York Times brought back vivid memories of a visit Buckley paid to the Hudson Valley.

Buckley was well known as a lover of classical music, and once wrote an article for the Times Magazine about his harpsichord studies. I no longer have the concert program, but Buckley's appearance must have occurred at least twenty years ago, when Leon Botstein was conducting a series with the Hudson Valley Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra, a smaller group drawn from the HVP which Botstein founded and later abandoned. Buckley appeared with the HVPCO, under Botstein's direction, in a special benefit performance at the Bardavon in Poughkeepsie.

I remember Buckley's parts of the program well. He brought his harpsichord, and attempted to play two movements of Bach's Concerto in D Minor (the second and first, in that order, but not the third). He also played the Bach's Chromatic Fantasia for solo harpsichord, but not its more difficult succeeding fugue.

Seeing the program, I presumed that the missing parts of the music were too difficult for Buckley to play. But all of it was. From the opening measures of the second movement of the Concerto, it was obvious that Buckley couldn't play anything accurately. He had a coach with him, perhaps his teacher, who was pointing to the places in the music where Buckley was trying to play, but Buckley wasn't even close to being able to get all of them. I noted with amusement that he was doing something I've otherwise seen only at low-level student recitals, when a kid has great trouble playing the music, leans forward towards the score and squints, as though if he or she could just see the notes more clearly they would be easier to play. Buckley was doing that, but as always it didn't help. He simply didn't have the technique to play
even the easiest passages of the music. For long stretches, he was literally playing more wrong notes than right ones--and I do mean literally.

This event lives vividly in my memory, because it was, by a comfortable margin, the worst public musical performance I have ever heard.

After an intermission, Buckley returned to narrate "Peter and the Wolf," which he did with his usual air of supercilious patrician pseudo-elegance. Fortunately the audience had very few children in it.

Kristol inadvertently reinforced my feelings about Buckley's devotion to classical music by writing that, on the last night of his life, he and a pianist friend "talked about music and politics and friends, to the accompaniment of a recording of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto, Bill's favorite." As if anyone with any appreciation of one of Beethoven's greatest masterpieces could use it as background music!

Buckley's recent death has called forth a variety of tributes to his supposedly positive qualities. But I prefer to remember him as a man who wrote ringing support of racial segregation in his early career, who played the role of aristocrat, and who somehow managed to turn his intellectual dishonesty into a successful career. Buckley was the man who supposedly made conservatism intellectually acceptable, but I suspect this was true only among conservatives. I never bought it.

Leslie Gerber

Parnassus Records Important Announcement

2008-01-11T06:38:00.000-08:00

I am sorry to announce that 2008 will be the last year for the Parnassus Select catalog. Sharp declines in sales, both in the number of records sold and the prices we get for them, have made the record business unprofitable, and it cannot continue. This realization also made the boss (Leslie Gerber) realize that I have been doing this long enough (37 years for the catalogs, 39 years altogether including LP publishing). It's time for a change.

We will continue to provide you with our usual quality of service--for whatever that's worth!--until it becomes time to close the business, a decision which will be contingent on the sale of the house where we work. Most likely we will discontinue the business sometime this summer. We'll give customers plenty of notice to complete any outstanding transactions, so please don't hesitate to order from our last catalogs. There will be no close-out sale; we have already arranged for the donation of our remaining stock to a university library.

One reason for announcing our closing well in advance is to give customers a last opportunity to order our custom CDs and DVDs and the private CDs we have been ordering from other suppliers. We will place our last order for the imported private CDs (including the Rare Moth items included in this catalog and our previous one) sometime in February. Our Parnassus Custom Video and Dis private items will be available only as long as we are publishing our catalogs, and some may run out of stock before then.

I am intending to continue the Parnassus CD label, and possibly even to increase the number of discs published. I'm also hoping to expand my writing career, and, frankly, to loaf a little more. All those records sitting on the shelf! It's time to enjoy them without having to use them mostly for background while I type listings.

--Leslie Gerber

Keeping Records out of the Landfill

2007-10-14T20:40:00.000-07:00

My recent column in Classic Record Collector, "To Chuck or Not to
Chuck," dealt with the subject of record triage. These days, when
dealing with classical records (78s or LPs) that are not outstanding
collectors' items, it has become difficult to dispose of them in ways
that will ensure their preservation.

Here's what we do at Parnassus. First, if possible, I discard any
records in poor condition, as they will only pollute the remainder.
These do go to the landfill and there is absolutely no hope for them.

Until a few years ago, we took LPs that did not sell through our
catalogs to a consignment shop which we maintained in a local
bookstore. That store is now gone, and our replacement in another
location is doing poorly. Nevertheless, I know several dealers who do
something like this with success, often in antique malls (collectives
of a number of dealers under one roof). It is important to date the
records in some way and keep the stock rotating or the customers,
even at very low prices, will stop looking at them.

The records we did not sell were given to the Woodstock Library,
which has--as many libraries do--an ongoing book sale to benefit the
library. Some libraries have even more vigorous operations than
Woodstock, which confines its sales to alternate weekends for the
half of the year when the sale building doesn't require heat, which
it doesn't have. I know libraries in my area which have "permanent"
library sales, open for several days every week year round. But not
all such sales accept records as donations.

There are also many charity thrift shops which sell records. The
nearest Salvation Army, in Kingston New York, has thousands of them
for sale at any given time. I think many local LP collections being
discarded wind up there.

Inevitably, some records donated to these sales will also wind up
being discarded. But at least they have had a chance at life in the
home of someone who still plays LPs.

78s are much more difficult. Most of the outlets described above, at
least in my area, won't accept 78s. Some local antique shops do sell
78s, but they don't carry very large quantities. There is one antique
shop in Kingston, "Lock, Stock and Barrel," operated by a man named
Jack Whistance, who was a record dealer himself many years ago. Jack
recently took a small 78 collection I needed to dispose of, although
he warned me in advance he couldn't pay for the records. Still, some
of them might find a home somewhere.

When attempting to dispose of large collections, the situation is
rather different. I can't give the Woodstock Library 5,000 LPs at a
time (although I would like to) because they don't have space. Most
colleges and libraries are not interested in acquiring 78s or LPs for
their collections. There are a few who are, but diligent research is
needed to find them. I made my contact with Brigham Young University,
described in my previous column, through a letter a customer kindly
placed on a music library list-serve. You can also try offering
collections to the few dealers who still advertise in publications
like Classic Record Collector. But with Parnassus, at least, the
collection must have a fairly high proportion of real collectors'
items or we can't buy it.

The Grand Piano Podcast 002 - Composers at the Piano

2007-09-16T19:57:00.000-07:00

Some of the most insightful piano interpretations come from the very composers who wrote the pieces. In this episode we listen to several of the 20th Century's most famous composer playing their own music. Several short interviews with the pianists accompany the music.

Bela Bartok - brief comments on Mikrokosmos
Bela Bartok - Mikrokosmos - Notturno #97
Aaron Copland - excerpt from interview, 1981
Aaron Copland - Piano Variations
Dmitri Shostakovich - Trio #2 - with David Oistrakh, violin; Milos Sadlo, 'cello.
George Gershwin - comments on the variations of "I Got Rhythm"
George Gershwin - Variations on "I Got Rhythm" - Radio boadcast April 30, 1934. Louis Kaplan, conductor.

Download The Grand Piano Podcast 002 - Composers at the Piano - 49Mb - 53 minutes - 128k mp3

Subscribe here

The Grand Piano Podcast 001 - History of Piano in Sound

2007-09-09T18:02:00.000-07:00

Is now available for download at http://grandpianopodcast.blogspot.com.

You can subscribe via Feedburner

Free Sample - Richter / Hindemith

2007-09-06T20:20:00.000-07:00

When I was a teenager, I first got to hear parts of Paul Hindemith's
piano suite entitled "1922." Three movements were included in a
fascinating piano recital by the composer-pianist Leo Smit called
"The Masters Write Jazz." I thought this was some of Hindemith's best
music, but Smit's performance didn't seem powerful enough, especially
in the final movement. I thought the intent of this movement was
forceful to the point of being downright apocalyptic, something that
did not come across in Smit's playing.

It didn't come across in any of the subsequent recordings that I
kept checking out, always hoping for something I didn't get to hear.
Then along came a recording by Sviatoslav Richter. Not for the first
time, Richter played a piece of music the way I wanted to hear it. In
his playing the fearsome implications of this music, a depiction of
the chaos of post World War I Germany and perhaps even a threatening
prediction of the horrors to follow, are fully realized.

It's a pity that this particular Richter recital was available so
briefly. It's not the best recorded Richter ever (although supposedly
digital, it sounds as though it might have been made on a portable
recorder). But the repertoire is fascinating, the sound is good
enough, and these are mostly the only Richter recordings of the music.

PCCD 20089/90 is available as item CD0311 in Parnassus Select Catalog P344

Sviatoslav Richter Suite "1922" : Ragtime (3 minutes - High quality VBR mp3 - 5.08 mb)

Sviatoslav Richter Suite "1922" : Ragtime (3 minutes - 128 bit mp3 - 2.79mb)

PCCD Free Sample - Youra Guller

2007-08-23T06:49:00.000-07:00

The Roumanian pianist Youra Guller is a shadowy but legendary figure. She was active in France for many years, where she became friends with major performers and composers, but she did not record until 1956. She made only three recordings, now all out of print, and all magnificent. Her 1956 Chopin collection for Ducretet-Thomson is an LP of such superlative rarity that we have never seen a copy. However, an authorized reissue appeared momentarily on a French CD label, and we now have that in our private reissue series as Dis PCCD 20291. Her stereo recording of Beethoven's Sonatas Nos. 31 and 32, done in France in the late 1960s, is another treasure, now on PCCD 20292.

Guller's last session, originally planned as a complete set of Rachmaninov Preludes, instead turned into a collection of encores and transcriptions. It was issued on LP by Nimbus, then reissued on CD with two new items but with two Scarlatti Sonatas missing. Our edition, PCCD 20311, includes all of the Nimbus material.

However, our greatest Guller treasure of all is the 1958 broadcast transcription of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto, conducted by the French legend D.E. Inghelbrecht. This recording has never been published officially, and we have it through the immense generosity of the famous German collector Ernst Lumpe. A critic friend of ours described Guller's playing here as having "the eloquence of a great actor doing Shakespeare," and you can hear the results for yourself in the first movement available here. This disc also includes another great pianist who was born in Eastern Europe but was trained in the French tradition, Vlado Perlemuter, playing Debussy's Fantasie for Piano and Orchestra.

PCCD 20302 is available as item CD0553 in Parnassus Select Catalog P342

Youra Guller / Inghelbreht / FRNSO Beethoven Concerto No. 4 - First Movement (19 minutes - High quality VBR mp3 - 28.7mb)

Youra Guller / Inghelbreht / FRNSO Beethoven Concerto No. 4 - First Movement (19 minutes - 128 bit mp3 - 28.7mb)

PCCD Free Sample - William Albright

2007-08-22T22:13:00.001-07:00

The late William Albright was the composer of a wide range of material. But he is likely to be remembered best for his involvement in ragtime, both as an excellent pianist and as a composer of new ragtime pieces in the 1960s and ‘70s which gained wide popularity among ragtime afficionados.

Unfortunately, while Albright recorded widely as a ragtime player, his only recording of his own ragtime pieces has never been reissued on CD. It includes his amazing Grand Sonata in Rag in his own excellent performance. The opening movement, Scott Joplin's Victory, successfully merges ragtime style and sonata form in an exuberant, memorable piece, played by the composer with tremendous verve. We just had to revive this one!

PACD 20329 is available as item number CD05476 in
Parnassus Select P342

PACD 20329 Albright Plays Albright -
Grand Sonata in Rag : Scott Joplin's Victory (7 minutes 55 seconds - High quality VBR mp3 - 13.9MB)

PACD 20329 Albright Plays Albright -
Grand Sonata in Rag : Scott Joplin's Victory (7 minutes 55 seconds - 128k bit rate mp3 - 7.2MB)

The great Catskill fork-lift fiasco: Update

2007-07-02T13:23:00.000-07:00

"The great Catskill fork-lift fiasco" update--July 2, 2007

As described in my "Surface Noise" column for the Summer 2007 Classic Record Collector, the crew from Brigham Young University arrived in the Catskills right on schedule. They immediately set to work sorting through the cargo container full of records with great energy and, I thought, remarkable fortitude. While the two students who came with David Day did take a couple of days off to see New York City, David worked every day for two weeks, and the two students continued their efforts for another week. One of them also turned to be fluent in Russian and translated for me the contents of a box of Melodiya LPs I had acquired which were labelled entirely in Russian.

David reluctantly had to discard some of the 78s, which were multiple copies of common sets. (He estimated he dumped at least 20 copies of the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto with Horowitz and Toscanini!) Still, more than 90% of the 78s are now in Utah, where the music library staff faces an incredibly daunting task of cataloging them all. I even managed to sort through some of the LPs and pass on to BYU several cartons of LPs.

By coincidence, just before the BYU Crew arrived, I was offered a collection of 20,000 LPs by a part time dealer across the river from me whose parents had decided it was time for them to reclaim their garage. I skimmed through them and could easily tell it wasn't a collection for me, and that I couldn't buy them. But I e-mailed David and he said he'd be interested in them. We paid my regular trucker to pick up the records, and they were added to the BYU shipment.

As of now, I still haven't a very good idea of what is in my newly-sorted LPs. But I do know that their numbers are more substantial than I had feared they might be, about 40,000 LPs. And while most of them, as with most LPs collections, aren't of interest, I've been finding some extremely interesting material, ranging from early chamber music records in good condition to sealed copies of some recent "audiophile" repressings of early stereo LPs. I'm going to be working on this collection for quite a while!

Parnassus Blog

2006-11-02T09:42:00.000-08:00

If any customer is interested in a LARGE volume of classical 78s, we'd love to hear from you.
845 246 3332

Record care - continued...

2006-09-27T07:28:00.000-07:00

First I must apologize for the lateness of this post. The rapid appearance of my column in Classic Record Collector took me by surprise, as I usually have two or three columns in advance at the magazine. In the future I will prepare any supplementary posts when I submit the column!

Obviously no one person will think of every relevant issue on a topic, and I'm sure that is true with record maintenance or any other topic I write about. Thus I invite correspondence at parnassus@parnassusrecords.com and will add all useful suggestions to this blog, with credit to the contributor.

LP record jackets are designed to protect the records inside, usually with good effectiveness. I find it very important to maintain the integrity of the jacket in order to safeguard the record. For example, if there is a substantial split in the top of the jacket, and the inner sleeve's opening faces up (as it should), dust will eventually migrate inside the inner sleeve where it can cause damage to the vinyl.

My preferred maintenance for LP jackets is acetate-based tape (Scotch Magic Tape or its many equivalents). Do not use cellophane tape (ordinary Scotch Tape) as it dries out within a few years, comes loose, and leaves a stain on the paper it covered. At one point in my record-collecting career I used to line the edges of every LP jacket I acquired with acetate tape as a preventative measure, which was a sensible procedure. I know some collectors have aesthetic objections to tape on jackets, but I have a more serious objection to damaging LPs.

Acetate tape is usually available in ½ inch and 3/4 inch widths. The 3/4 inch width is easier to use and, since it covers considerably more area, sticks more securely. The ½ inch width is somewhat less noticeable when applied to the jacket but a bit more difficult to apply well. This is a matter of individual choice. I usually use the 3/4 inch width.

In more extreme cases, where there is truly serious damage to one or more edges of the jacket, I have been known to use two-inch transparent packing tape for repairs. I have also used this kind of tape to repair the spines of LP set boxes, where it is often the only sensible choice. There is no question that this tape is more noticeable and intrusive than other types. And it has to be applied very carefully or it winds up with folds and creases where it sticks to itself. Still, it is sometimes the best choice in difficult situations.

I am not the world's leading authority on 78 storage and I will particularly welcome suggestions from readers on this topic. I do know that, being heavier than LPs, 78s need even more regular support dividers on shelves than LPs do. I don't think you should store more than a foot of 78s in individual sleeves without a divider for support. Even 78s in albums should not be allowed to lean very far off perpendicular. And my comments in the column about the temperature tolerance of LPs do not necessarily apply to 78s. Excessive cold can certainly make them brittle. Sometimes it can even make them crack. If 78s are cold, they should be allowed to warm gradually before they are played or handled.

No recorded media should ever be kept without protective covering--not LPs, CDs, DVDs, laserdiscs, or any kind of tape format. This is equally true of 78s, and no sensible collector will ever keep an unprotected stack of 78s. Since individual 78s don't often have printed outer sleeves, I think they should be kept in some kind of double sleeve arrangement, perhaps a paper inner sleeve covered over with the kind of plastic outer sleeves that I don't recommend for LPs. They probably won't stick to paper 78 sleeves until the temperature becomes hot enough to warp the records, in which case the problem of the plastic sleeves becomes unfortunately irrelevant.

Vinyl 78s can be treated pretty much like LPs. They won't be damaged by cold, but all other strictures regarding the care of 78s also apply to them.

--Leslie Gerber

The Fall of Tower

2006-09-05T06:05:00.000-07:00

The collapse of Tower Records did not come as a surprise to me. I
was only surprised that it took so long.

Here's an illustrative anecdote. When Tower first opened in New York
in the early 1980s, a friend of mine who was a specialist in early
music took a trip from Woodstock to New York just to shop at Tower.
She came back filled with enthusiasm. She had spent over $300 (a lot
for her, especially in those days) on LPs she had never seen before.
She told me Tower had the best early music section she had ever seen
in a record store.

Six months later she went back. She was really disappointed. There
were a few new releases, some of which she bought. Otherwise, she
said, the early music section had just the things she had left behind
six months earlier, and the records she had bought had not been
restocked.

That was Tower in a nutshell. The business always seemed to have an
institutional policy: throw as much stock at the customers as
possible, and don't bother about the details. Stock control was never
a strong point at Tower. They were more interested in sheer quantity.

I used to shop the Tower Annex whenever I was in New York. It was a
large store around the corner from the main Tower Records shop (the
first one, on 8th Street) filled with remainders and used records. I
would look through a bin of remainders and often find 20 or 30 copies
of the same record. That's a hideous waste of expensive retail space,
but apparently it worked better for them than to have only one or two
copies in the bin and replace them when they were sold. That was too
much trouble. Things were sometimes better in the regular retail
sections of the store, but not always.

Tower wasn't very good with special orders, either. (Too much
detail?) The sales staff wasn't usually very well informed. The
classical section I visited was usually staffed by pierced people who
were listening to rap music on their headphones while they rang up
sales.

Here's another illustrative Tower story. More than ten years ago I
was recruited by a magazine editor I knew who had been running the
classical music section of Tower's free in-store magazine Pulse! He
had talked the management into trying a new all-classical review
magazine, Classical Pulse! The magazine was designed for quick
reading. Reviews were brief, and they were headed by a one to five
star rating.

Classical Pulse! ran for several years. It was obviously a success.
Paid advertising was abundant. Records reviewed favorably in the
magazine sold very well (but there were also plenty of unfavorable
reviews, although writers were asked to recommend alternatives when
panning a CD). Eventually, management pulled the plug on Classical
Pulse! because, they said, the advertising was not covering the
entire cost of publishing the magazine. That had never been the plan
in the first place, and the increased sales the editors had been
hoping for had materialized very impressively. But that was too much
thinking, I guess.

I'll have some fond memories of Tower. I got plenty of interesting
material for my collection there. Because Tower had a branch in
Japan, it was able to purchase many Japanese CDs and (my favorite!)
classical laserdiscs which were never issued here and bring them into
the U.S. Among many other things, I still have my original Toshiba CD
of The Beatles' "Abbey Road," the first Beatles CD ever issued. It
was meant for domestic Japanese sale only, and it was deleted when
Toshiba realized how many copies were being sold outside of Japan.
Mostly by Tower.

Milton Katims

2006-03-09T12:55:00.000-08:00

When I was growing up in Brooklyn, my father would occasionally take me to rehearsals of the orchestra he played in, the Brooklyn Community Symphony Orchestra. It rehearsed and performed at Brooklyn College--which I eventually attended--under the direction of the principal violist and assistant conductor of the NBC Symphony Orchestra, Milton Katims. In 1954, when I was eleven, Katims accepted a position as music director of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. He remained at that job for more than twenty years, raising the orchestra's status from a provincial orchestra to a major one.

Recently I had some correspondence with Mr. Katims, who was again living in Seattle after a period of directing the University of Houston's School of Music. He wrote about his pleasant memories of the Brooklyn Community Symphony, and kindly sent me a copy of his privately made CD including some of his viola recordings.

Katims died on February 27, at the age of 96. Aside from his immense contributions in Seattle, he was a world class violist and left us recordings of superb chamber music collaborations--many of them with the Budapest Quartet--and even a few solos. He remained active almost to the end of his life, giving up his beloved tennis sessions only last year. He was a great musician and a gracious man, and we are all the poorer without him.

Fine coincidences

2006-03-04T12:10:00.000-08:00

I love it when my favorite things come together. Through no effort of mine, Parnassus's "house string quartet," the Colorado Quartet, has been involved in collaborations with our "house composer," Katherine Hoover. Hoover has just written a second string quartet for the Colorado String Quartet, which will be performing it in a number of venues. One of those is right in our neighborhood, Bard College, where the CSQ will play on Sunday afternoon, April 9, a program which also includes Beethoven's Op. 18, No. 4, and Schubert's Quartet in G, D. 887. I hope some Parnassus customers may be able to get to this concert, which is at Bard's Olin Hall at 3 PM. There isn't even any admission charge!

Memories

2006-02-16T10:29:00.000-08:00

Recent events have been reminding me of experiences from my past. One of my most vivid concert memories comes from Carnegie Hall in 1965. Gyorgy Sandor played all three of Bartók's Piano Concertos in a concert commemorating the 20th anniversary of his teacher and mentor's death. Without reference to the program--which I'm sure I still have--I can even remember that the orchestra was the American Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Gregory Millar, a name I know otherwise only from some classical recordings on the Fantasy label.

This amazing performance was the only time I heard Sandor perform in person. When the Bard Music Festival devoted a year to Bartók, Sandor was invited, but only as a speaker. I got to meet him then and chat briefly with him. I am glad I was able to tell him how much his superb records of Bartók's music had pervaded my life. His world premiere recording of the Third Piano Concerto, with Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, remains in my collection, along with his Vox recordings of the Piano Concertos (despite the sometimes shaky orchestral playing) and virtually all of Bartók's solo piano music. They remain great treasures.

I don't think Sandor minded his identification as Bartók's pupil and proponent, but he was probably under-rated as a pianist overall. Many of his Columbia and Vox LPs of music by other composers are still worth hearing. His recent death ends a particularly valuable career, and we will miss him.

We will also miss Nikita Magaloff, whose many Philips and Concert Hall recordings will keep his memory alive.

For more than a decade I have been doing volunteer teaching for the Center for Lifetime Studies, a senior program affiliated with Marist College. CLS sometimes sends its teachers to do programs at senior citizen homes, and thus I wound up one afternoon at a large, luxurious senior residence in Milbrook, New York, called The Fountains. After my presentation, a number of the attendees came over to thank me for coming. One of them was a beautiful old white-haired woman, who told me, "I am not a musical expert, but I know a little about it because I was once married to a musician." I asked her for his name, in case I might know of him. "His name," she told me, "was Emanuel Feuermann."

I actually felt my knees go weak.

When Emanuel Feuermann died in 1941, he left a widow, Eva. Because Feuermann had fled the Nazis and had not yet been able to build up savings, Eva was left with very little money. She became a kindergarten teacher. Eventually she remarried. I found out later from others that, despite her modesty, she was actually very well informed about music and was involved in presenting chamber music in New York. After she was widowed for the second time, she moved to The Fountains. She was pleased to learn that I was the person who had reissued on LP, for the first time, two of Feuermann's major recordings, the first release on my Parnassus LP label. She had long owned and treasured a copy.

We met for lunch several times after that, at The Fountains. On one of these visits, she showed me a videotape transfer of the only film of Feuermann playing, a video which has recently been released by Cello Classics (http://www.celloclassics.com/cc1013.htm). We also met several times at concerts and plays in Dutchess County and she was always very friendly and gracious.

Eva Feuermann Lehnsen died last month. I'm told she was 91 years old. A piece of our past, and mine, died with her.

In 1990, my wife Tara and I went out one night for some long-forgotten event. Because we wouldn't be home that evening, I set my VCR to record an intriguing-sounding program scheduled for that night by A&E, back in the days when that station was still actually broadcasting arts programs. It was called "The Gifted Ones," and it was about musical prodigies. The next day we got around to watching the tape. All four of the young musicians profiled were impressive, but one of them was truly astonishing: a nine-year-old violinist named Sarah Chang.

From that time on, I have carefully followed Chang's career, and have heard her in person several times. Yehudi Menuhin called her "the most perfect violinist I have ever heard," for reasons I can understand. Fortunately, I saved that A&E video, along with several others I've accumulated over the years. Since Parnassus started producing custom videos, I've been planning to compile all the Chang material I had. We finally have the quality DVD equipment we needed, and that compilation is now available, as PDVD 106. While the single most impressive item on it (the Sarasate "Carmen Fantasy" with orchestra, performed at age 11) has slightly blurry video quality, it's still quite watchable, and the other items are even better. They include three documentary sequences and four complete performances, including two versions of the Sarasate (one with piano, at age ten!). None of this material has ever been issued on commercial video in any format. I am extremely pleased to make this disc available.

When the Albuquerque Philharmonic Orchestra gives its performances of Beethoven's Mass in C and "Choral Fantasy" on February 26, the first thing it plays after intermission will probably be "Happy Birthday to You." This has become a tradition with this orchestra at its last concert in February, saluting the oldest member of the orchestra: my father, Morris Gerber, who will be 93 on February 28. At 62, I am the oldest person I know personally who still has both of his parents, and I consider myself extremely lucky.

I do come from a musical family. The cellist Janos Starker is a distant cousin. My uncle, Leonard Felberg, had a long and distinguished career as a professor of violin, most recently at the University of New Mexico, and as a performer in the southwest and in South America. (His only solo recording is the Wood Violin Sonata on the Opus One label.) Both of my parents were high level amateur musicians throughout their working lives, although they both earned their livings as school teachers. After they retired from teaching, though, both of them entered the professional ranks: my father as a violinist in the Scranton Symphony and the Ridgefield Symphony, my mother as a chamber music coach at Chamber Music Associates at the 92nd Street Y in New York.

Since they moved to New Mexico, my father has played with the Albuquerque Philharmonic Orchestra, a community orchestra, which is now directed by my cousin David Felberg. My mother was an accompanist and vocal coach for the UNM opera department, but since she had minor health problems she has restricted herself to occasional chamber music concerts in home settings. The piano soloist in the APO's "Choral Fantasy" will be Lenny's wife (and David's mother) Arlette Felberg, who also taught for years at UNM.

If you're in Albuquerque on February 26--as some Parnassus customers are--do attend the concert on February 26, at 3 PM, at the First United Methodist Church, 314 Lead SW at 4th. And say hi to my father after the concert. You'll get to know who he is when he stands up as the orchestra plays for him. He loves meeting Parnassus customers.

The Death of Dorian

2006-02-01T14:13:00.000-08:00

Sad news for classical CD collectors at the beginning of February. The last supplier of the Dorian label has now withdrawn its entire catalog.

Dorian was practially our home-town label. It was headquartered in the nearby city of Troy, New York, a locale chosen because of the presence of the wonderful Troy Savings Bank Music Hall, where Dorian made many of its recordings. It was an enthusiastic supporter of all-classical radio station WMHT-FM, and its expert engineers recorded many local concerts for broadcast.

Dorian was an adventurous label. I don't believe it ever made a recording of a Beethoven Symphony, but it recorded and published an extensive series of Latin American music, much of it with the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, which turned out to be an excellent orchestra. (Many of these recordings, and some others with the Dallas Symphony, were conducted by the late Eduardo Mata.) Its recordings by Cuarteto Latinoamericano included a complete series of the Villa-Lobos string quartets.

While Dorian was not particularly known for celebrity performers, it did make the first recordings of the wonderful violinist Rachel Barton (now recording for Cedille), and it brought her to the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall for a wonderful all-Liszt concert which I attended. (Who knew Liszt had composed so much violin music!?) Dorian also made two superb CDs with the pianist Ivan Moravec, an international treasure, and a number with the lesser-known but also excellent Czech pianist Antonin Kubalek.

Dorian will probably be remembered most for its extensive series of early music recordings. I was particularly partial to the Baltimore Consort and its excellent lutanist Ronn McFarlane--especially after hearing McFarlane perform a wonderful solo concert at Woodstock's Maverick Concerts series and then interviewing him for Amazon. McFarlane also collaborated with Julianne Baird on a number of outstanding discs. But Dorian also recorded many other early music groups and much uncommon early music repertoire. It also had an interesting series of folk music recordings.

The outstanding sound quality of the Dorian line might eventually help preserve some of its recordings. Since the best sellers among classical CDs these days seem to be super-bargain labels like Naxos and Brilliant Classics, I hope that a substantial portion of the Dorian catalog will wind up being preserved on one of these labels. It would be a lovely way to remember a worthwhile project.

Passing Note

2006-01-24T06:08:00.000-08:00

Parnassus regularly tolls off listings of the great musicians we have recently lost, simply because I think it will be of interest to our customers. Thus we note the death of the magnificent soprano Birgit Nilsson, who transformed our ideas of singing and assured Wagnerians that Kirsten Flagstad hadn't turned out to be the last great Wagner soprano. We are also deeply saddened to hear of the illness of Marilyn Horne, as fine a person as she is a performer, and pray for her recovery.

One recent loss that may have escaped the attention of Parnassus customers was that of Bob Weinstock, founder of the Prestige label. Few people realize that Weinstock was the inventor of the jazz LP as we came to know it. His label, founded in 1951, was not the first one to issue jazz music on LPs. But Weinstock was the first to realize that the LP made possible a completely different type of recording. Starting with a Zoot Sims session in 1951, Weinstock encouraged musicians to play beyond the usual 3 or 4 minute limitation of the 78, and issued the first studio-recorded extended jazz improvisations.

Most other labels were slow to catch on. As late as 1953 and ‘54, most jazz LPs were collections of singles. It seems--I've been researching this recently--that Charlie Parker, who recorded up to 1954, never made a real LP as a leader. All those Parker LPs were collections of tracks recorded as singles. The one exception occurred when Parker played as a sideman on a Miles Davis session (now collected on a CD called "Collector's Items")--for Prestige!

I also want to alert customers to the existence of a fascinating CD collection issued by the Archeophone label, which specializes in reissues of acoustical recordings. "Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry 1891-1922" is a two-disc collection issued to accompany a book of the same title by Tim Brooks, which I have just started working my way through.

While most of the music on this set is not classical, some of it is. Aside from the wonderful recordings of early gospel groups, this collection includes a 1918 recording by Roland Hayes ("Vesti la giubba" from I Pagliacci!), recorded and published at the singer's own expense. It also has five of the ten known sides issued by Broome Special Phonograph label, a short-lived black-owned company that apparently issued only classical music performances by black artists. I never thought I'd have the chance to hear R. Nathaniel Dett play his own music, but he does here, very beautifully. Two of the other performers issued by Broome are well remembered: the singer, composer and arranger Harry Burleigh, and the violinist-composer Clarence Cameron White.

With its excellent program booklet and expert transfers, this wonderful set is worth owning even if you aren't as interested as I was in hearing the voices of Booker T. Washington and Jack Johnson and a 1917 recording by Eubie Blake. This set is available through regular retailers (including our favorite special order service, Rhinebeck Records, www.cdtrackdown.com) or from the label itself (www.archeophone.com).

test

2006-01-23T20:09:00.000-08:00

test post