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Gaelic Melodies from the Chieftains

Washington has already begun observing St. Patrick's Day (or, if you prefer, Irish American Heritage Month) with the Chieftains' annual visit to the Kennedy Center last Friday night. The celebration will continue through March 28, with James Galway's appearance at George Mason University and the Smithsonian Resident Associates' program "Celebrating John McCormack," featuring the superbly qualified Irish tenor Robert White. It's a busy time of year for Irishmen, and perhaps that's why they had to inflate March 17 into a whole month.

Those who want to celebrate on the actual day, wherever their favorite performers may be, can find plenty of appropriate recordings. The Chieftains' latest, "An Irish Evening" (RCA 09026-60916-2), was recorded live last year in Belfast, includes Roger Daltrey and Nanci Griffith as guest vocalists and is, like all their work, utterly irresistible.

McCormack recorded prodigious quantities of music in the early years of this century, and it is all coming back now on CDs. The most complete survey is on the English label Opal, a subdivision of the indefatigable Pearl company, which has reissued 550 of his approximately 800 recordings. The content is almost entirely Irish ("Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms," "Come Back to Erin" "The Dear Little Shamrock" etc.) in Volume 7 of its survey titled "Count John McCormack" (OPAL CDS 9847, two CDS). The 57 selections were made in 1904-06, and Opal's pursuit of completeness goes so far as to include multiple recordings of the same song, even duplicate takes done on the same day -- two recordings of "The Wearing of the Green" made on Nov. 10, 1904, for example. The sound is old and scratchy, but it reveals an extraordinary voice and a fine sense of style. "John McCormack in Opera" (Nimbus NI7820) is amazingly better in sound, thanks to the Nimbus "Ambisonic" transfer system, although all 21 selections are pre-electric and 17 date from before World War I. Highlights include exquisite performances of "Il Mio Tesoro" and "Una Furtiva Lagrima," as well as the "Flower Song" from "Carmen" (in Italian) and the Prize Song from "Meistersinger."

Galway is available in both audio and video recordings. "The Magic Flute of James Galway" (RCA 09026-60918-2) has 14 popular encore pieces (Rachmaninoff's Vocalise, Schumann's "Traumerei" etc.) transcribed for flute and flawlessly played. "James Galway at 50" (RCA Laser Disc 09026-60982-6) is an hour-long television documentary that includes snippets of music, with Claudio Scimone conducting I Solisti Veneti, but the frequent voice-overs and interruptions make it clear that this is not primarily a musical production. Filmed mostly in Switzerland where Galway has lived since 1977, it shows him giving master classes and seminars, relaxing, checking his schedule on his home computer, explaining why his marriage to Annie went sour, performing, and discussing topics that range from how to accept applause to the necessity of polishing your flute regularly. He also gets off a few heavy statements on music -- for example: "It's just as difficult to play 'Annie's Song' as ... the slow movement of the Mozart D-Major Concerto, because you have to apply your whole self." His personality comes across clearly for a reason supplied by Scimone in a backstage interview: "Jimmy is an actor as well as a musician."

Strings In the late 1890s, Arnold Rose, the concertmaster at the Vienna State Opera, rejected a violinist named Fritz Kreisler, who was applying for the job of assistant concertmaster. Kreisler "couldn't sight-read," Rose claimed, but one might wonder whether he was also afraid of direct comparisons with the incredibly talented young Kreisler, who went on to become one of the most noted violinists of the 20th century. The material for such a comparison has now been made available by Biddulph, an English label that is busily converting very old recordings to the CD format. In its "Kreisler Collection" (LAB 049-50, two CDs), it has just reissued his monumental 1926-27 recordings of the Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Brahms Violin Concertos, together with some short encore pieces and the Bach Adagio in G Minor from his Sonata No. 1 for unaccompanied violin. In Biddulph's CD restoration, the early electric recordings have an enjoyable fullness of sound and richness of detail, and the performances are phenomenal. The Mendelssohn Concerto is particularly suited to his mellow tone and elegant phrasing, but all three recordings are landmarks and the technique in his famous cadenzas is electrifying.

Coincidentally, on "Arnold Rose and the Rose String Quartet" (LAB 056-57, two CDs), Rose is heard playing the same Bach Adagio, as well as the Concerto for Two Violins (with his daughter Alma) and (most importantly) leading Beethoven's Quartets No. 4, 10 and 14. Playing mano-a-mano, Rose emerges as a skilled, thoughtful musical craftsman with a sense of period style unusually well-developed for that era, but Kreisler, in comparison, sounds almost like a force of nature. The Rose Quartet was formed in 1883, and even in its 1927 recordings it still retains a strong flavor of the old Viennese style. Technically, it can hardly compete with the hair-trigger work of modern quartets -- say, the Tokyo in its new recording of the late Beethoven Quartets (RCA 09026-60975-2, three CDs) or the Kronos Quartet in its brilliant, exotically flavored "Pieces of Africa" (Nonesuch 9 79275-2) -- but its homogeneity of style, purity of intonation and intimate sense of dialogue are noteworthy. The style of string-playing, with gut strings, minimal vibrato and lots of portamento, will intrigue players (and some ordinary listeners) interested in historic performances.

For my taste, however, both the Kreisler and the Rose performances of the Bach are surpassed, in the Bach Adagio, by the violinist on another new Biddulph reissue: "Nathan Milstein: Baroque Masterpieces" (LAB 055). Among all the great students of Leopold Auer, Milstein was the one who showed the strongest affinity for violin music of the 18th century -- "arranged" for modern tastes, played with piano rather than harpsichord and romanticized in interpretation, but still cherished for its unique qualities and played with virtuoso technique and temperament. His way may not be the only way to play this music or the most authentic, but after more than half a century these 1930s recordings of the Adagio, the Partita No. 2 in D Minor, Tartini's "Devil's Trill" Sonata and works of Vivaldi, Vitali, Pergolesi and Nardini still communicate directly and powerfully.

Finally, Biddulph has done a real service to music-lovers (though it is charging a premium price for less than 15 minutes of music) in its issue of Kreisler's recording of Chausson's "Poeme" (PK 1), taken from a 1948 broadcast with Donald Voorhees conducting the Bell Telephone Hour Orchestra. This was one of Kreisler's favorite pieces and his performances of it were widely acclaimed, but he never recorded it commercially. No single, complete recording of this broadcast performance could be found, so Biddulph's technicians painstakingly assembled, spliced and balanced a set of diversely recorded fragments to produce a finely integrated recording. The orchestra is not one of the world's greatest and Kreisler was a bit past his prime in 1948, but this is a treasure.

Other treasurable historic performances by great string players:

Brahms: Cello Sonata No. 1; Grieg: Cello Sonata in A Minor, Op. 36 (Intaglio INCD 705-1). Taped live at the 1964 Aldeburgh Festival, these performances present two bold and technically dazzling virtuosos, Mstislav Rostropovich and Sviatoslav Richter meeting at a chamber music summit. Exciting and satisfying.

Albert Spalding (Biddulph LAB 054). A scion of the family whose name is famous for sporting goods, Spalding was one of the first American violinists to achieve international fame, and his talents as a performer and composer are well represented on this disc. In the Mendelssohn Concerto in E Minor and Spohr's No. 8 in A Minor as well as several of his own works, his bright, focused tone, assured technique and elegant phrasing sound almost like the manifesto for a skilled, no-nonsense American school of interpretation.

Sammons Plays Elgar (Pearl GEMM CD 9496). A bit less technically precise than Spalding and a bit more expansive emotionally, English violinist Albert Sammons was a happy choice for the 1935 recording of Elgar's pensive Sonata in E Minor and the 1929 recording of his Violin Concerto (with Sir Henry Wood conducting) immaculately transferred to CD.