RECORDINGS IN REVIEW

1 6 3 R R E C O R D I N G S I N R E V I E W D E W E Y F A U L K N E R By one of those fortunate coincidences, 2017 was both the 175th anniversary of the founding of the New York Philharmonic and the 100th anniversary of its first recording. To commemorate these occasions, Sony/BMG has created a 65-CD box set called New York Philharmonic: 175th Anniversary Edition (Sony 533636) that samples the orchestra’s releases, from Josef Stransky’s initial recording of Ambroise Thomas’s overture to Raymond to Kurt Masur’s 1995 recording of Antonín Dvořák’s cello concerto with Yo-Yo Ma. With a very few exceptions it includes the orchestra’s releases originally on both the RCA Victor and Columbia labels only. What came before and what came after are missing, for quite di√erent reasons. The before, from 1842 to 1917, is easily explained. Sound recording only began in 1877, and early orchestral recordings weren’t often attempted since the sound of an orchestra could only be approximated. Available were acoustic (that is, recording horn) input and unamplified output (again via horn), all heard via 78rpm shellac discs playing for around four minutes each. The Philharmonic ’s early years are consequently aurally undocumented, from its initial concert in 1842, which began with Ludwig van 1 6 4 F A U L K N E R Y Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, through the age of the Master Conductors , especially Theodore Thomas (1877–91), Anton Seidl (1891–98), and Gustav Mahler (1909–10). There were also interim years, many of them characterized by multiple conductors, an unhelpful situation replicated in many years to come. The Philharmonic set starts with Mahler’s successor, Josef Stransky (1911–23). The quality of his work is disputed, but it appears that despite being adventurous in repertoire, his talents were unequal to his chosen music. His recordings, the orchestra’s first, were of twenty-six brief, popular pieces set down in 1917–19. Our set has the Raymond overture and an abridged reading of the slow movement to Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony, premiered by the Philharmonic under Seidl in 1893. As Barbara Haws’s brief but informative notes point out, several players on the recording probably played in that first performance. The 1917 sound on both pieces is understandably crude and says little about the orchestra. After Stransky left, the Philharmonic in 1923 engaged Willem Mengelberg from Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw Orchestra as principal conductor. Stransky and Mengelberg were made co-conductors for the 1922–23 season, a typical situation for New York. Less typically, Mengelberg never became sole conductor: he always shared the job with one or more others. Even so, doing the bulk of the work, he restored the orchestra’s playing and made a series of recordings with it from 1922 to 1930. In the Aprils of 1922, 1923, and 1924 the Philharmonic and Mengelberg recorded fourteen pieces acoustically for (RCA) Victor . Their sound is improved from Stransky’s e√orts of five years earlier but still crude. The set includes one of these, the first movement (the only part recorded) of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony . But work on microphones (and amplification and loudspeakers ) in the early 1920s had revolutionized sound capture and enabled ‘‘electrical’’ recording, whose sound was capable of far greater dynamic range and subtlety than acoustic horns allowed. Alas, the medium of delivery remained the four-minute 78-rpm disc, and recording sessions were arranged to capture pieces in these small chunks, although some recordings could be made on film stock, allowing greater lengths to be set down uninterrupted. (Behind this was Hollywood’s addition of sound to silent motion pictures in the mid-twenties.) R E C O R D I N G S I N R E V I E W 1 6 5 R RCA Victor between late 1925 and early 1930 brought Mengelberg and the Philharmonic into their updated studios to make these new electrical recordings. From the 1925 sessions the set has two pieces, one being the orchestra’s first electrical recording...