Composers who wrote just one symphony

[adriano]

@sdtom - I agree with you - but I also like very much Karajan's version and, why not, Ansermet's 

[Alan Howe]

I like Karajan's recording of the Franck too. It badly needs remastering, though.

[adriano]

Thanks, Alan :-)
Sorry for having repeated myself... Yes, the Karajan Franck needs a remastering - in the style it is now being done by Warner of some EMI recordings which have not been yet remastered in the early 2000's. I've just bought two of Karajan's Strauss items from Japan, which are quite satisfactory, although the Sinfonia Domestics is in super sound already in the 1988 (first) German remastering (In my opinion, the supreme interpretation of this work anyway...). Warner are on the way of reissuing a lot of older recordings on bargain series with original cover design, of which the "complete Satie" box is a real highlight. For example, the digital remastering of Beethoven's Piano Concertos with Klemperer/Barenboim is from 2006 - but excellent. The series "Home of Opera" has also started, supposedly only with downloadable libretti, but in there too, there are already titles which were remastered in the early 2000s. Another important Warner reissue series is "Erato Story".
Does this not look like a big last surging before the definite disappearing of CDs?

[Alan Howe]

Very possible, although maybe there are still a lot of 'older guys' like us out there who will buy this stuff?

[sdtom]

we just really don't know. If I guessed I'd say 5 years

[adriano]

Meanwhile computer technologists have decided that e-mail too will just survive just a couple of years and that other communication forms will be taking over, based on those silly social media platforms like Twittter and Facebook - o my, how happy I am to be an oldie already!

[Gareth Vaughan]

If we lose email there will be nothing for it but to return to pen and ink and snail mail. I absolutely decline to use Facebook or Twitter. The latter is just silly, while Facebook seems, uniquely, to combine the superficial with the pernicious.

[Alan Howe]

Absolutely right. Pen and ink it would have to be for me too...

[MartinH]

I know we're way off topic - but there's this to consider:

Radical improvements in recording technology and a changeover takes roughly 30 years. You had the lowly Edison 78s, which were then replaced by the long playing record. That was then disposed of by the Stereo LP. LPs ruled the roost from about 1955 to 1985 when the CD started taking over. Now here we are 30 years later and the preferred method of music reproduction seems to be downloading or audio feed from outlets like Spotify and iTunes. In virtually every prior tech era, there was a rush to re-record the repertoire using the new, improved format. So we had Elgar symphonies in acoustic recordings, then electrical, then LP, then stereo, then cd - but now what? Same thing happened with all the hallowed classics: Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Wagner...

So I wonder, now that the medium seems to be moving away from a physical object, will there be the same need to re-record everything? Certainly Unsung composers benefitted by the LP and especially the CD era, but will Raff, Reinecke, Rubinstein stand a chance in the music-in-the-cloud era? I don't think so. I think the great era of recording music is about to end, and if you want to hear some orchestra it's going to be like what the Berlin Philharmonic is doing - subscribe and listen (and watch) at home. The Metropolitan Opera currently runs operas in movie theaters across the country, but it's only a matter of time before they make it a home option.

I don't know how I feel about all this yet. I have enough great cds to last a lifetime and downloading or using a streaming service doesn't interest me in the least. I could go for orchestra concert broadcast subscriptions. I'd pay to have a high quality transmission of say the London Symphony, the Vienna Philharmonic, or the Boston Symphony. It's going to be interesting to see where all this goes. But I fear terribly for the future of classical music; the way we discovered it - in record stores - is long gone, and kids today don't have that luxury and will likely never discover the glorious treasure of music that lies waiting for them.

[Alan Howe]

...and yet and yet: the independents seem to be issuing recordings of unsung music at an unprecedented rate....

[adriano]

MartinH and Alan, I fully agree with you :-)
Just see what Botstein and his orchestra are doing since quite some time now - only downloads. Fortunately enough I am not a great fan of him :-)
Will never forget my trepidations, in the 60s and 70s, hunting in LP shops or second hand shops... My travels to big cities included running to these locations immediately after arriving at the train station, before checking in to my hotel. Casual discoveries of unsung or yet unknown pieces would caused sleepless nights! Or DGGs splendid boxed issues of Karajan's Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikovsky, or some other nice cover design - all this became part of an additional sensual experience (to the musical one). Will never forget the EMI boxes of Busoni's Piano Concerto and Sibelius' Kullervo Symphony, or those Decca (Tebaldi and Sutherland) operas with horrible cover art - which you were getting used to, or nicer cover art of symphonic repertoire, or those RCA Soria boxes with gorgeous libretti... Such optical and tactorial experiences made me feel happy. You would have your favorite jackets liying around in your flat or placed againt a wall, and often look a them with joy. Or some nice French EMI gatefold albums...
The most luxurious items were Decca's Ring in that wooden slipcase (which we insider called "the tombstone") or Bernstein's GMS, with that little golden Mahler medal sticked on, or Vivaldi's and Chopin's Erato wooden box.
During my student years I jumped meals in order to save money for LPs...
Will also not forget my big disappointment when labels had departed from using linen backridges on their boxes; I even wrote letters because of this!
These were times you just had Radio (which over here was not yet so pioneering concerning unsung pieces), the Gramophone, Schwann and Bielefelder catalogues - or mouth-to-mouth propaganda - and not much more information sources, except reviews, of course, but unusual repertoire was not yet reviewed so frequently. In England and the USA the LP genre was much more cultivated. But one must not forget, that LPs were quite expensive in those years!
Must say reviving now similar "extra enjoyment" experiences with some recent luxury CD boxed presentations, as Stravinsky's and Glenn Gould's Sony-CBS, or Warner-EMI's definite Callas edition. This reveals that a few cultured freaks are still sitting around in those hopelessly personnel-reduced production offices of the few left over big labels...
All this applies, naturally, to my love for books...

[Ilja]

Martin, having been a witness of the transfer period of LPs to CDs, I have witnessed precious little repertoire innovation. What mostly happened was that LP repertoire was being re-recorded, and (perhaps more importantly) that the lower cost and higher retail prices of CDs meant that record companies' profits were higher than ever before. How much of that revenue went into new product you may calculate for yourself, but I wouldn't be optimistic.


What CDs have done in the long term is to simultaneously drastically reduce the cost of the music carrier, and to lower the barriers for content creation. Everone with a PC can record music (in principle) and reproduce it. But a CD is only a carrier, just like a floppy disc is a carrier. We're living as much in the age of digital recording as we have been over the last thirty years - there's just a shift in carriers that change and become even cheaper. That means that everyone with an ounce of perseverance is able to produce their own recording, but also that the commercial recordings can much sooner reach the critical mass which makes producing the recording worthwile.


In other words: taking a risk will pay much sooner. The traditional way of recording with big-name (and big-wage) stars, on the other hand, has become much more problematic, since the market doesn't allow for those costs to be recouped. As for the unsungs, though, I'm optimistic, and I think the story of the past decade justifies that optimism.


Personally, I'm grateful if the CD goes. I've always loathed them as objects. The big problem, however, is providing documentation with recordings, but there are more ways to get around that issue and let's be honest, CD booklets are hardly ideal for reading purposes. Recently I picked up a recording of Van Bree's Allegro moderato for four String Quartets in a lovely book, with the files in the back of the volume as a USB thumb drive. It was a joy to use.

[MartinH]

I have to disagree with your initial premise. From my observations, the cd era was a gold mine of repertoire innovation. Yes, there were some valiant, intrepid producers in the LP era. Candide, Turnabout, Genesis, and others certainly brought us some rare repertoire. But it was a lucky coincidence of economics and technology that gave us the (nearly) complete works of Franz Schmidt, Glazunov, Bax, Stanford, Parry, Rontgen, and many, many more. My first exposure to any symphony by Glazunov was 40 or so years ago on a Columbia LP, which only whetted my appetite and increased my frustration that I couldn't hear the rest. There was an LP set on Melodiya which was really hard to get. But it didn't take long in the cd era that I had not one, but now five complete sets of Glazunov symphonies - astounding! I thought I would never hear any symphony of Schmidt besides the 4th, yet thanks to cds, there are multiple versions of each. So yes, I think the economics of cds dramatically improved the chance to hear rare repertoire.

I recently read an astonishing statistic: the 1977 Karajan Beethoven symphony set sold 8 million copies. Sales of that level will never happen again. First, there are already so many fine sets, it's going to take a lot to get people to buy another. Then the general public is much less interested in classical than ever, and lastly, there are no more Karajans. H

CD booklets are all over the place. Some great, some awful. Some hard to read, others not worth reading. I love the cd as a carrier just as others still cherish the LP. I just hope that there are cd players, for home and auto, to last me for the rest of my life.

[Alan Howe]

And with that, let's return to the thread topic...

[Pyramus]

As it happens I've just been listening to the Grimm and Dietrich symphonies. Both contain some fine music and seem to look forward to Brahms. The Dietrich though is let down by a rather weak finale but he was by no means the only composer to grapple with the "finale problem". Arriaga, Voříšek and Rott would no doubt have written more.