Rudolph Ganz (conductor)
The Complete St. Louis Symphony Recordings
rec. 1923-1925, St Louis, Missouri; piano recordings; 1930, Victor Studios, Camden, USA
Pristine Audio PASC739 [79]

Pristine Audio is winkling out obscure corners of recorded history and its focus falls here on St Louis in the form of the local orchestra and its music director, the eminent Swiss-born Rudolf Ganz (1877-1972). He was a Busoni student, making his debut with the Berlin Philharmonic and touring extensively as a pianist before settling in Chicago at the turn of the century. He was appointed to the position in St Louis in 1921 and from 1923, for three consecutive years, as we learn from Mark Obert-Thorn’s producer’s note, Victor recorded the orchestra in a series of sessions. Altogether they made a total of sixteen published sides of largely popular repertoire, and they have all been collected in this disc.

Clearly, St Louis was not the place to record swathes of symphonic literature, but it served as a useful expansion of Victor’s geographical base. Things started with Weber’s Euryanthe Overture in October 1923, a recording that preserves a good amount of thistle but also equally good frequency response. The fugal section is quite trenchantly played and the strings, which sound to be quite small in number but are reasonably well-drilled dig in, allied to the expected bass reinforcements of the day. There is a lot of portamento. Eduard Lassen’s Festival Overture was recorded at these winter sessions and, like the Weber, this was recorded on two sides. The overture is based on a Thuringian folk melody that’s very Tannhäuser-like, which is intoned at the work’s climax in glorious fashion, though here the hard-scampering fiddles do their best along with the tuba reinforcement to suggest something of the work’s vitality. Another rarity at the first sessions was d’Albert’s overture to The Improvisator, a lusty piece of inconsequentiality and for good measure Victor also recorded Ganz and the orchestra in Sinding’s Rustle of Spring.

In the second year only two works were recorded, Johann Strauss’ Artist’s Life waltz and Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 – moderately effective. The return was meagre, for whatever reason and it seems economically inefficient to have recorded the orchestra in just two pieces, so maybe there were unpublished sides. However, December 1925 was better and fortunately Victor was now in a position to record electrically. Light repertoire again predominated, first Rossini and Mendelssohn – both creditably vigorous if not the last word in finesse – and then Edward German’s Three Dances from Nell Gwyn. German himself had conducted these for HMV in 1916, but the records weren’t issued until 1920, and Ganz was only the second conductor to record them. He does them very well and they’re athletic, buoyant and very communicative. The sessions were completed by Bolzoni’s Minuet – a charmer – and Rimsky’s Song of India from Sadko. The electric recordings certainly show the orchestra is better technical light than the acoustic sessions.     

As a pianist Ganz recorded acoustically for Pathé, much later for Carl Fischer in 1932 and for American Decca and other small labels. His MacDowell recordings were once reissued on Dante along with his Piano Concerto, Op.32 where he was the soloist and Frederick Stock conducted the Chicago Symphony. He also made four rather average Victor sides in 1930, and these form an appendix to this volume. Whether the repertoire was uninspiring to him – Victor gave him chestnuts – or whether he was having an off day, his vaunted romanticist credentials don’t really emerge. It’s very respectable playing, at best.

Ganz’s St Louis sessions straddle the acoustic/electric divide and represent the lighter muse, in a way familiar from the far more extensive recordings Dan Godfrey made with the Bournemouth Municipal Orchestra in Britain at around the same time. The transfers are all splendid.

Jonathan Woolf

Contents
Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826)
Euryanthe – Overture
Eduard Lassen (1830-1904)
Festival Overture
Christian Sinding (1856-1941)
Rustle of Spring
Eugen d’Albert (1864-1932)
The Improvisator – Overture
Johann Strauss II (1825-1899)
Artist’s Life – Waltz
Edward Elgar (1857-1934)
Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1
Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868)
The Barber of Seville – Overture
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
Hebrides Overture
Edward German (1862-1936)
Three Dances from Nell Gwyn
I. Country Dance
II.. Pastoral Dance
III. The Merrymakers’ Dance
Giovanni Bolzoni (1841-1919)
Minuet
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908)
Song of India from Sadko
Adolf Jensen (1837-1879)
Murmuring Zephyrs* (arr. Niemann)
Felix Mendelssohn
Spring Song*
Franz Liszt (1811-1886)
Liebestraum No. 3*
Fryderyk Chopin (1810-1849)
Valse Brillante, Op. 34, No. 1* (arr. Joseffy)
St. Louis Symphony Orchestra
Rudolph Ganz (conductor or *pianist)