Daisy Kennedy (violin)
The Complete British Columbia and Duophone Recordings
Hamilton Harty (piano and conductor)
rec. 1919-26
Biddulph 85063-2 [2 CDs: 146]

Daisy Kennedy (1893-1981) was a leading Australian violinist who flourished in the years 1912 to 1937. She was heard by Jan Kubelík who suggested she study with his own teacher, Otakar Ševčík, which she did, largely in Vienna. Success came quickly and it was to London that she gravitated and where she remained for the rest of her life, though she made numerous world tours in the early 1920s in particular. She was tall, flame-haired, charismatic and convivial and she married two artistic personalities, pianist Benno Moiseiwitsch and, when that marriage failed, the writer John Drinkwater. Her second husband’s death brought her classical career to an end, and she then performed with an all-male orchestra in a London hotel until her retirement in 1950.

She recorded for British Columbia between 1916 and 1922 but the company terminated her contract shortly thereafter and it’s clear that her records didn’t sell that well. They divide into two broad categories – sonatas and genre pieces. Columbia was making remarkable strides in building up a library of sonata recordings. Albert Sammons and William Murdoch recorded Beethoven, Frank, Grieg, Ireland, Coleridge-Taylor and Kennedy, who was teamed in these sonata sides with Hamilton Harty, recorded at the same time for the company. She offered Grieg’s First and Second Sonatas, to complete the trio of sonatas as Sammons had recorded bits of No.3. She also recorded Schumann’s First Sonata and added the Scherzo from Brahms’ F.A.E. Sonata and the slow movement from Sonata No.3 where Harty proves an expert, strong partner but where she seems underpowered. These were, of course, all abridged but the Schumann, in particular, gives us some of her best playing on disc. Grieg’s First Sonata was recorded a few years after the Second and is heard in better sound and showcases her expressive, deft playing. There’s quite some flair in the finale of No.2.

The larger-scaled orchestrally-accompanied pieces don’t fare quite so well. A brass-laden band haunts Beethoven’s Romance No,1 and she plays tremulously. Saint-Saëns’ Concerto No.3 was her warhorse but she never recorded it so we must be content with the Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso which, like the Beethoven, features Harty conducting the unnamed orchestra. The percussion can be heard clearly here in this 1919 recording whilst Kennedy dispatches the passagework efficiently. It’s certainly not Biddulph’s fault that the side turn is so galumphing. For that I’d blame Columbia.

Her performances of the character pieces attest to her affiliations with charming morceaux and her cultivation of contemporaries, as she promotes a number of composers whose pieces were either dedicated to her or which she played in concert. The names may not be familiar now but she was assiduous in playing the music of Nándor Zsolt, Alfred Mistowski, Hilarion Kozloff and Sydney Rosenbloom, amongst others. Her playing of them is characterful though her tone is not voluptuous. As far as I’m aware she remains the only violinist to have recorded the Idylle finnoise and mildly ethnic Mélodie tartare of Hilarion Kozloff (Illarion Kozlov) and Rosenbloom’s gloomy Edwardian Lament. Zsolt’s Dragonflies was once a popular piece but this kind of frivolous if charming repertoire has fallen out of fashion, and more’s the pity. She plays the first section, as instructed, muted. She plays two of Efrem Zimbalist’s Slavonic Dances, pieces he had recorded some years earlier in 1912. Her rhythm is good but she doesn’t etch the Hebrew Melody and Dance with the kind of ethnic slant that Zimbalist naturally does.

In 1926 she recorded for the Duophone company, then still recording acoustically given the monopoly on electric recording still lay with Columbia and HMV/Victor – apart from some experimental forays by very small companies. There is piano-accompanied Bach – she played all-Bach recitals, one of which was critiqued by the peppery Ezra Pound writing under the critical hat of ‘William Atheling’. Her Cramer waltz has buoyancy though her Brahms is rater distended metrically. Cyril Scott was in vogue and he dedicated two works to her but she plays here his Danse nègre, Op.58 No.5.

There are two pieces unpublished on 78s and appearing for the first time. The first is a Duophone test recording of Hubay’s Plevna nóta, Op.1, a typical, bipartite folksy piece which shows her in good form. The other is a stranger disc, a c.1926 Columbia test of Krakauer’s Paradise in Kreisler’s arrangement. Quite why she was making this test for a company that had paid off her contract three years previously isn’t clear. Maybe it had something to do with the new technology. In any case this is her only electrically-made recording.

There is also a stimulating 18-minute BBC interview, made in 1969, in which Kennedy reminisces about her career with Irene Slade. The greatest violinists she heard? Ysaÿe, Kreisler, Elman and Flesch.

The thirteen-page booklet notes have been written by the present writer and the transfers have come largely from the collection of Raymond Glaspole who has transferred the copies. Andrew Walter has effected the digital mastering very effectively. Very few of Daisy Kennedy’s discs have been reissued in over a century, so this release will make a real appeal to those who appreciate and respect the byways of recorded history.

Jonathan Woolf

Contents
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Romance no.1 in G major for violin and orchestra, Op.40 (1801)
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Air on the G-string arr. Wilhelmj
Louis-Toussaint Milandre (c. 1756- c.1776)
Minuetto arr Burmester
Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
Preghiera (Andante from Octet, D.803) (1824)
Wiegenlied, D.498 (1816) arr Elman
Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Violin Sonata no.1 in A minor, Op.105 (1851)
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Scherzo from F.A.E Sonata (1853)
Adagio from Violin Sonata No.3 in D minor, Op.108 (1888)
Edvard Grieg (1843-1907)
I. Allegro con brio and III. Allegro molto vivace from Violin Sonata No.1 in F major, Op.8 (1865)
II. Allegretto tranquillo and III. Allegro animato from Violin Sonata No.2 in G, Op.13 (1867)
Interview of Daisy Kennedy by Irene Slade on 24 April 1969
Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921)
Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, Op.28 (1863)
Alexander Zarzycki (1834-1895)
Mazurka in G major, Op.26 (1884)
František (Franz) Drdla (1868-1944)
Danse
Alfredo D’Ambrosio (1871-1914)
Canzonetta, Op.6 (1907)
Ethel Barns (1873-1948)
Swing Song (1907)
Alfred Mistowski (?1872 -?1964)
Hornpipe from Suite of Six Pieces
Hilarion Kozloff (Illarion Kozlov) (1878-1933)
Idylle finnoise, Op.5 (108)
Mélodie tartare
Sydney Rosenbloom (1886-1967)
Lament
Waltz-scherzo
Nándor Zsolt (1887-1936)
Dragonflies
Fritz Kreisler (1875-1962)
Liebesfreud (pub.1905)
Efrem Zimbalist (1889-1985)
Slavonic Dances: No.1 Russian Dance (1913)
Slavonic Dances: No.2 Hebrew Melody and Dance (1913)
Alexander Krakauer (1866-1894)
Paradise arr. Fritz Kreisler
Johann Sebastian Bach
Prelude from Partita No.3 in E (c.1720)
Johann Baptist Cramer (1771-1858)
Waltz arr Burmester
Johannes Brahms
Hungarian Dance No.2 in D minor arr Joachim
Cyril Scott (1879-1970)
Danse nègre, Op.58 No.5 (1908)
Johann Brandl (1760-1837)
Du alter Stefansturm (pub. 1887) as ‘The Old Refrain’ arr. Kreisler
Anonymous
Londonderry Air arr. O’Connor-Morris
Jenő Hubay (1858-1937)
Plevna nóta, Op.1 (1877-78)

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