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RECORDED SOUND
Coffin and Keyboards
By CHARLES REID
ON a corner of Russell Square, Bloomsbury (at No. 38, to be exact), there is a sign in letters so small that they amount to a blush of self-effacement. It says: 'British Institute of Recorded Sound.' If the ear has its gold mines, this is one of the richest open diggings in Europe. You can't swing a cat, though, in these premises. Happily, this very week the Institute has acquired a freehold building near the Albert Hall, with ample storage space, a lecture-recital theatre and six o: so listening cubicles. At present there is only one cubicle, generally known as 'The Coffin.' Here I heard a two-piano recital involving eight composers of our day or time. But more of that in a moment.
The Institute has a small, cluttered adminis- trative office, with gramophone catalogues going back to the Deluge. Out of the ruck, like a striking cobra, rears one of those tall, curvaceous horns in papier-mâché which were once a gramo- phile's must. It is part of an archaic machine that has been adapted to take those cylindrical records of Edwardian days which make so deliciously nipped and nasal a sound. Behind a desk sits Patrick Saul. nominally the Institute's secretary, but a good deal more than that in effect. 'Saul is the Soul of the Institute,' says someone merrily.
Mr. Saul gave me a thumbnail account of what is and has been going on. Uri to 1955 Britain was one of few western countries with- out a national collection of recordings: i.e., recordings, new and old, worth preserving for historical reasons, the catalogues covering not only music but also literature, drama. speechify- ing, great public events. birdsong. everyday sounds that are on their way out and, of course, pop entertainment.
Since 1955. fortified by Arts Council and GLC subsidies, private subscriptions and. since 1963, by annual Treasury grants, the Institute has acquired a record library of 110,000 items. Most of these are 78-revolution discs up to sixty years old or more. The rest are outstanding long-plays
which have been commercially 'deleted' or are hard to come by in this country for other reasons. Items are still coming in, either by purchase or as gifts, at the rate of a thousand a month. Records aren't the only line. There's a room with machines which—apart from other jobs. including transfers of 'cylindrical' sound— can be pre-set to tape BBC broadcasts after everybody's left at night. If this amounts to immortality. every British composer commis- sioned to write a piece for next year's Proms may depend on being immortalised. Tape stocks of one sort or another now stand at 2,000-3.000 hours. But the disc stock is the thing. Mr. Saul asks me, is there anything I'd particularly like to hear? He puts up various suggestions. Do I care for two-piano music'? Indeed, I do! Play- ing in two-piano music happens to be an old vice of mine. Come this way. then. We clomp down- stairs. I sit in 'The Coffin.' glad of my dockyard duffel coat, while one of Mr. Saul's colleagues feeds eight Masters of our time (and their partners) from a cramped control-room next door.
Bela BartOk and Ditta Pasztory, his second wife. play his Sonata for Two Pianos and Per- cussion. A French label, Classic, did it on four 78r. discs. The up-and-down glissando rolls for pedal limp, in the first movement don't come through. But then. I didn't expect them to. Microphones, cutting processes and surfaces weren't then what they are today. Technically, this limitation is fascinating in itself. But the essential message is the overwhelming authority of the performance. Both keyboards, and the 'kitchen' as well, are a physical extension of Bartok's conceiving, creating spirit and brain. l'he thing hits and sweeps like a tidal bore.
I cannot say the same of Igor Stravinsky, part- nered by his son Soulima, in the Sonata for Two Solo Pianos on French Columbia. Father and son set about the music like pedagogues with a train to catch. The tenderer beauties of the music get short shrift. The Nocturne, that `heaventree of stars hungs with humid night- blue fruit,' chug-chugs by as if programmed and computerised. But there are sudden, majestic peaks that take the breath away—the culmination of the final fugue, for example, and the prelude to that fugue. This recording is Igor Stravinsky all over. It tells us things about his intellectual temper that print could never tell us.
And now: twin ghosts from Benjamin Brit- ten's past. With Clifford Curzon, on four Decca sides, he plays his Introduction and Rondo alla Burlesca (1940) and Mazurka Elegiaca (1941). Everybody seems to have forgotten these pieces. In the case of the first, this is understandable. Those who used to dismiss Britten as a super- ficial young man, too clever by half, had a prima-facie case here. The Mazurka, a tribute to Paderewskrs memory, is up a different street altogether. There are tolling octaves, a melody that brims with romantic tears, introspective harmonies, a flash of violence, a flare of pride. The playing is supreme. . . On to Dimitri Shostakovich. playing his Concertino Op. 94, on a Monitor (US) label, with his son Maxim. This is certainly historic—but only, I fear, as showing the banality to which Shostakovich, by nature one of the great spartans, ascetics and consolers of his art, can sink when he unbuttons for an 'occasional' piece.
It still takes Frenchmen to be light-minded, tip-to-the-minute and de luxe all at the same time. Here are two of them to prove it. Francis Poulenc and Jacques Fevrier do the former's Concerto for Tv. o Pianos with the Conservatoire Orchestra (French Columbia); and, with Mar- celle Meyer, Darius Milhaud does his Scara- mouche Suite (French HMV). Souffles of this sort wear and wash well. Olivier Messiaen is a third Frenchman. Nobody could call his eight-move- ment Vision de l'Amen (with Yvonne Loriod, on a Vega long-play) a souffle. It is a broth that keeps boiling over, a broth with too many notes, pretensions and facile pieties in it. But this, too, is history in its way. This, too, must be pre- served. The same goes for Paul Hindemith's Sonata for Piano Duet (with Jesus Maria San- roma, Australian HMV), though in this case the history lesson is different: how a cheeky young man, up to the neck in the Utility Music theories (and practice) of the 1920s, lived to con- tinue the great German polyphonic tradition while retaining his own accent and am- bience. . . .
As things stand, any citizen with reasonable bona fides can walk in from the street and, if 'The Coffin' is unoccupied, have a recital of the above or some other sort put on for his benefit. He needn't be a paid-up Friend of the Institute (minimum subscription one guinea). He needn't pay a penny, in fact. In my view, this is all wrong. I'm all for a nominal charge. But not too nominal.
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