Author: Ken Shaw ★2017
Date: 2003-04-08 15:15
Kenwrick -
The recording of the Brahms Quintet on the Gallodoro CD is not the same one that was issued on LP. The CD is quite good, but the LP was much better.
The LP was issued in the early 1950s on the Concert Hall label. It was made in the very early days of LPs, before tape recorders had become generally used, and Concert Hall was a dirt cheap label, with no money for frills, so each movement was recorded in a single take, with no editing.
It's a remarkable performance, totally unlike any other. It's very masculine and even virtuosic. The players waste no time and ignore the idea that this is somehow the swan song of the ancient Brahms, in his "autumnal" days.
Gallodoro is an amazing technician, and several legends have grown up around this recording -- for example, that that he owned no A clarinet and transposed everything and that he borrowed a plastic (or at least student-quality wood) A clarinet for the recording. However, he was a member of the NBC Symphony at the time, and Kalmen Opperman has told me that he owned and used an excellent A clarinet.
Unfortunately, the Concert Hall recording was pretty primitive. The label was notorious for poor sound and crunchy pressings on thin red vinyl. I have a copy of this pressing and also of a later pressing on black vinyl, which is a bit less bad. The disks had no groove guard (where the label and rim are raised to prevent rubbing of the grooves) and the inner liners (when they were used at all) were extremely flimsy waxed paper, which fell apart when you took the record out. The upshot is that recording was redone for the CD available from Gallodoro's web site.
Best regards.
Ken Shaw
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The Clarinet BBoard
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