Loeb Music Library

Dinah Washington… The fabulous Miss D!

Dinah Washington, The Fabulous Miss D! AC 36777

We recently received this fine Hip-O-Select collection that brings together in one place all of Dinah Washington’s Keynote, Decca and Mercury singles from 1943 to 1953. The book/CD package has great photos, reproductions of record labels and album covers, and detailed discographical notes for each single. The introductory essay was written by Marc Myers, who pens the Jazz Wax blog.

Find it here: Loeb Music Library AC 36777

The Rake’s Progress

Igor Stravinsky, The Rake's Progress. CD 38218

Just in on CD is this landmark recording from 1953, the first complete Rake’s Progress conducted by the composer. Stravinsky leads the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus and a cast including Hilde Gueden as Anne, Blanche Thebom as Baba the Turk, Eugene Conley as Tom, Mack Harrell as Nick Shadow, Martha Lipton as Mother Goose and Norman Scott as Trulove.

Find it here: Loeb Music Library CD 38218

Menotti in German

Gian Carlo Menotti, Operas. DVD 1780

We recently acquired an Arthaus DVD that contains 1960’s German-language studio recordings of Menotti’s The Old Maid and the Thief and The Medium. Elisabeth Höngen and Hilde Konetzni are featured in both operas, along with the Orchestra of the Vienna Volksoper. The DVD also includes an interview with stage director Otto Schenk.

Find it here: Loeb Music Library DVD 1780.

Venus Records

Eddie Higgins Trio, Essential Ballads Best. CD 38226

Over the past few years we’ve received a number of jazz titles on Japan’s Venus Records. This label has primarily been marketed to a Japanese audience, but is becoming more visible here in the U.S. Cambridge-born pianist Eddie Higgins, who died in the summer of 2009, was a favorite of the label’s owner and is featured on many Venus titles. A recent release culls “essential” ballads from some of those recordings.

Find it here: Loeb Music Library CD 38226.

- Peter Laurence

Handel Cantatas on Glossa

Handel, Cantate Italiane, vol. 1, CD 37786

We recently acquired the first 6 volumes in a wonderful series of Handel’s Italian cantatas on the Spanish Glossa label. These early works were written between 1706 and 1710 and contain a wealth of musical material that the composer would draw on later for his operas. Fabio Bonizzoni leads La Risonanza with vocal soloists including Roberta Invernizzi, Romina Basso, Yetzabel Arias Fernández, Maria Grazia Schiavo, Nuria Rial, Emanuela Galli, Raffaella Milanesi and Salvo Vitale.

Find them here: Loeb Music Library CD 37786-37791.

Ken Vandermark… Resonance

Ken Vandermark. Resonance, AC 36775

A new jazz arrival is this 10-CD box set of composed and improvised music by Ken Vandermark and musicians he assembled in Poland along with Not-Two Records owner Marek Winiarski. A rich array of compositions for full ten-piece band and various small group configurations, this box highlights sets and concerts recorded in Krakow during a 6 day period in November of 2007.

Find it here: Loeb Music Library AC 36775.

Levine… 40 Years at the Met!

James Levine at the Met, DVD 1752-1763

We just received the Met’s 21-DVD collection celebrating the career of James Levine with eleven complete operas and three concert programs recorded from 1978 to 2003. Some highlights of the set include a powerful performance of Wozzeck with Katarina Dalayman and Falk Struckmann (DVD 1753), Renata Scotto in Don Carlo and in all three Il Trittico operas (DVD 1761 and DVD 1756), and Astrid Varnay’s last appearance at the Met in Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (DVD 1762).

Find them here: Loeb Music Library DVD 1752-1763.

The Neos label…

York Höller, Sphären; Der ewige Tag, CD 37845

In the past few months the library has acquired a number of new recordings of contemporary music on the Munich-based Neos label. These include quartets by Helmut Lachenmann (CD 37847), Wolfgang Rihm’s Vigilia (CD 37811), and CDs featuring the works of York Höller, David Philip Hefti, Jörg Widmann, Dieter Schnebel, and Georg Friedrich Haas.

Find them here: recordings on the Neos label.

-Peter Laurence

New Finnish CDs

Jukka Tienssu. nemo – Puro – Spiriti. CD 37559

We recently acquired a group of Finnish titles on the Alba label including two recordings with music by composer Jukka Tiensuu (CD 37559 and CD 37560). Complementing our collection of his scores, these recordings include a piano concerto entitled Mind, selections from Alma for orchestra and electronics, and a piece for accordion and orchestra called Spiriti. And on the subject of accordions, the instrument figures prominently in the musical activity of Finland from its love of Tango to its International Accordion Festival held each year in Ikaalinen.

Explore further: recordings of Finnish tango from our collection.

Tom Jobim

Tom Jobim. Waters of march. DVD 1706

Originally from Brazilian label Biscoito Fino, this rich three-part DVD program (DVD 1704, 1705 & 1706) chronicles Jobim’s life and music through a mix of documentary material, interviews and live performances. Taken primarily from a 1990 show, performances feature Jobim on vocals and piano, with a band that includes cellist Jaques Morelenbaum and the occasional special guest: see Chico Buarque in Part 3/She’s a Carioca/Ela è Carioca doing “Ela Desatinou”. Part 1 (No More Blues/Chega de Saudade) also contains material from a 1995 performance with Buarque, Milton Nascimento, Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa, Gilberto Gil and Paulinho da Viola, and Part 2 (Waters of March/Águas de Março) presents beautiful footage of a place dear to Jobim, Rio’s Botanical Gardens.

Royal Swedish Opera Archives

Die Walküre. Royal Swedish Opera Archives. CD 36758

We’ve just received several CDs on the Caprice label featuring unpublished house and live recordings from the Royal Swedish Opera. A series highlight so far is a complete performance of Die Walküre (CD 37658) taken from 1955 and 1956 in which Birgit Nilsson sings her first Brünnhilde. Another issue offers Mozart opera arias and excerpts (CD 37659) recorded between 1952 and 1967 with performances by Nilsson, Elisabeth Söderström and others. More titles in this series — Strauss, Berlioz and Verdi (including Björling in Trovatore from 1957) — are on the way.

- Peter Laurence

Ivor Novello. Bain Collection,
Prints and Photographs Division,
Library of Congress, LC-B2- 6025-8

As May washes over Cambridge, no fan of Jeeves-era British popular music can pass a garden without thinking of Ivor Novello, who gave us several ravishing songs about lilacs and Spring. Novello ranked with Noel Coward as England’s top triple threat of the light spectacular. When not writing, scoring and starring in a procession of backstage comedies and Ruritanian extravaganzas which reigned over Britain’s stages for twenty years, Novello launched careers, fed out-of-work show people, fostered every kind of talent, threw thrilling parties and displayed his faultless profile to best advantage in a range of films.  His death in 1951 gave rise to public grief as intense as that for Princess Diana half a century later.

The Dancing Years, Act I.ii, p.2
Loeb Music: ML50.N934 D3 1939
(click to enlarge)

Loeb Music Library recently acquired Novello’s personal rehearsal libretto (ML50.N934 D3 1939, typed on carbon paper in a clip binder) for his  1939 smash hit The Dancing Years. The pages explode with notes, eliminations, elaborations, mapping Novello’s legendary theatrical insight at work. If you can read his writing, he inserts a fairly important plot point – a scene in which Maria, the heroine, tells Rudi, the hero, that she has had his child – in longhand on the back of the previous scene.

It’s much easier to follow the final dialogue for the 1951 film version (PN1997.D362 1950.) Daringly for a show produced in Neville Chamberlain’s England, the stage version of The Dancing Years had concluded with Rudi and Maria’s last meeting in an Austrian prison, where Rudi is under arrest for aiding refugees.   By 1951, political defiance was slightly passe, and the film ends poignantly rather than tragically, with Maria introducing Rudi to his long-lost son.

For Novello, the “joy of giving” Maria sings about was not just a figure of speech: his time, his talent, his influence, his money, his company, he gave them all freely and gave great joy in the process.

For Further Reading, Viewing and Listening: Read the rest of this entry �

A few recent acquisitions in the recordings collection:

Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer

Loeb Music: AC 36770

We recently received this deluxe bound edition of Anita O’Day’s complete scrapbooks that includes a documentary film about the singer and a bonus DVD of outtake interviews and musical performances. The set also includes tributes by jazz writers James Gavin and Will Friedwald, as well as excerpts from Anita O’Day’s autobiography High Times, Hard Times. Many will know of her performance from Jazz on a Summer’s Day, a documentary about the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, but this edition provides a wealth of new material about her fascinating life.

Find it here: Loeb Music Library AC 36770.

Eddy Brown (Symposium)

Loeb Music: CD 37296

Recently the Marston label featured early recordings (Dec. 1914) by violinist Eddy Brown in its set The Dawn of Recording: The Julius Block Cylinders. Born in Chicago in 1895, Brown studied violin with Jenö Hubay in Budapest and Leopold Auer in St. Petersburg and he made his debut in Germany in 1910. On this new Symposium disc, he can be heard playing Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky from Berlin in the mid-1920s and the Sonata Virginianesque by American composer John Powell around 1940 (with Powell himself accompanying). In the 1930s Brown became active in radio, and he served as director of WQXR for almost twenty years.

Find it here: Loeb Music Library CD 37296.

Karl Amadeus Hartmann and the String Quartet (Cybele)

Loeb Music: CD 37004

This 3-CD set inaugurates a new series (Künstler im Gespräch) on the Cybele label that will combine a featured composer’s music with spoken word recordings that help to illuminate that composer’s work. Here the focus is on Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s complete works with string quartet – two quartets, the Little Concerto for String Quartet and Percussion, and the Chamber Concerto for Clarinet, String Quartet and String Orchestra. The spoken word material includes Hartmann himself from 1962, an interview with his wife in 1994, and a conversation with his son from 2009. Notes in German and English are also rich with biographical detail and illustrations.

Find it here: Loeb Music CD 37004.

- Peter Laurence

The Music Library receives boxes of new CDs and DVDs every week; Peter Laurence, the library’s Acquisitions Assistant for Recordings, shares a few of the latest offerings to catch his eye:

Stockhausen Text-CDs

Loeb Music: CD 36779.

A new group of Stockhausen Text-CDs (vols. 16 – 22) that feature the composer lecturing on his own works, including Momente (1963), Telemusik (1966) and Hymnen (1967). Also included here are interviews from 1970-72 and a private recording of Kurzwellen from Osaka, Japan.

Find them here: Loeb Music Library CD 36773 – CD 36779.

Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings By Alan Lomax

Loeb Music: AC 36768.

An 8-CD box set of stories and songs by Jelly Roll Morton recorded at the Library of Congress in 1938. In addition to solo piano versions of his songs, this collection also provides Jelly Roll’s lively and earthy recollections of the early years of jazz… earthy enough to earn the set a Parental Advisory “Explicit Lyrics” sticker.

Find it here: Loeb Music Library AC 36768

Medieval Jazz Quartet plus three

Loeb Music: CD 36513.

Early Music meets jazz! Composer, pianist and vocalist Bob Dorough conceived and arranged this unique and surprisingly swinging collaboration (originally released in 1961) that features recorders, crumhorns and a jazz rhythm section. Dorough sings and plays tenor recorder, accompanied by LaNoue Davenport and other members of the Manhattan Recorder Consort, and by guitarist Al Schackman, bassist George Duvivier and Paul Motian on drums. Dorough went on to work with Miles Davis and to compose most of the music for the educational animated TV series Schoolhouse Rock.

Find it here: Loeb Music Library CD 36513

Riccardo Chailly: Live, The Radio Recordings from the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra

Loeb Music: CD 36092.

Sparked by Chailly’s amazing performance with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra at Symphony Hall on February 25th, I’m including this recently acquired 13-CD set of live recordings made in Amsterdam between 1985 and 2003. Included are works from Beethoven to Berg to Berio, as well as music by Dutch composers such as Peter Schat, Alphons Diepenbrock and Tristan Keuris. Rounding out the set is a bonus DVD of Chailly and the orchestra performing the Rite of Spring, The Firebird and Pulcinella.

Find it here: Loeb Music Library CD 36092