[78-L] Beethoven's seventh

[DAVID BURNHAM]

Ted Kneebone wrote:

Writing of the 2 turntable cutter arrangement, I recall my copy of the 
Toscanini/NYPSO Beethoven 7th symphony (Victor) had those strange side 
breaks.  Some had lots of silence at the beginnings of sides.

dl wrote:

....his 1936 New York 
Philharmonic recordings were all made by cutting abruptly from one lathe to the 
next..the side breaks occur in mid-note and some sides have very long silent 
portions before the music cuts in.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Are you sure you folks aren't talking about the NBC "Eroica"?  I always doubted Irving Kolodin's comments on the Victrola LP reissue because, to my ears, there is no evidence that the NYPSO Beethoven 7th was recorded as a continuous performance.  For instance, since this was recorded in a (presumably), empty Carnegie Hall, the ambience from the end of side one would have overlapped the beginning of side two and there would have been an abrupt cut off.  I don't hear evidence of that.  Of course it's always possible that since AT knew when they were going to switch sides he paused the performance for just a couple of seconds to enable them to do so.  You never hear a Toscanini recording where he slowed down as he approached a side change as you often hear from Henry Wood, Hamilton Harty, Ormandy, Koussevitzky and sometimes Weingartner.  This makes it easier to recouple to sides to a continuous performance.

For the "Arturo Toscanini collection" produced by John Pfeiffer in the late 80s/early 90s, Mortimer Frank wrote about the first side of the Beethoven 7th:

In this reissue a second, more propulsive and better-recorded take of the first movement introduction - found in most but not all previous editions of the performance - has been used out of respect for Toscanini's perference for it.

If it was "better recorded", it must have been recorded under different circumstances at a different time.  My personal preference is for the more leisurely tempo of the first take which, as dl said, almost runs into the smallest lable Victor, (Canada), ever used.

I don't think this recording's place will ever be challenged as one of the most significant recordings of the 20th century, however, about 35 years ago, I ran into a certain Mr. Shulman, at that time the president of the "Toronto Record Collectors Society", who asked me what recordings I had of the Beethoven 7th.  I listed the ones I had at that time - Toscanini, Ormandy and Weingartner, (2 versions) - and his response was, "So what you're telling me is that you don't have a recording of Beethoven's Seventh."  He went on to explain that the only recording of this work worth considering was the Stokowski version, (M17 I think).  I went to just one of their gatherings and met the most tedious assembly of record collectors you could ever imagine, (I don't recall that Lennick was there).

db