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During Adolph “Bud” Herseth’s tenure as principal trumpet, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra commercially recorded Maurice Ravel’s orchestration of Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition on seven occasions between 1951 and 1990.
Following are the first tracks from each of those seven recordings, each featuring Herseth performing the work’s opening promenade fanfare.
Recorded in Orchestra Hall in Chicago in April 1951 for Mercury
Rafael Kubelík conductor
Wilma Cozart recording producer
David Hall recording supervisor
C. Robert Fine and George Piros recording engineers
Recorded in Orchestra Hall in Chicago in December 1957 for RCA
Fritz Reiner conductor
Richard Mohr producer
Lewis Layton recording engineer
Mark Donahue mastering engineer
Recorded in Medinah Temple in Chicago in July 1967 for RCA
Seiji Ozawa conductor
Peter Dellheim producer
Bernard Keville and Ernest Oelrich recording engineers
Recorded in Medinah Temple in Chicago in April 1976 for Deutsche Grammophon
Carlo Maria Giulini conductor
Günther Breest producer and recording supervisor
Klaus Scheibe engineer
Recorded in Medinah Temple in Chicago in May 1980 by London
Sir Georg Solti conductor
James Mallinson recording producer
James Lock and John Dunkerley balance engineers
Recorded in Orchestra Hall in Chicago in November 1989 for Chandos
Neeme Järvi conductor
Brian Couzens recording producer
Mitchell Heller location engineer
Paul Smith assistant engineer
Richard Lee editor
Recorded in Suntory Hall in Tokyo, Japan in April 1990 for Sony
Sir Georg Solti conductor
Humphrey Burton writer and director
Tomoyuki Tashiro and Renato Rezzonico executive producers
Shuji Fujii director
Juro Yokoyama recording director
Tetsuo Baba, Akira Fukada, and Andreas Neubronner recording engineers
Phil Piotrowsky lighting cameraman
Frank Baliello HDVS engineer
Armando Madaffari HDVS technician
Jean Rezzonico producer
John Dunkerley balance engineer
Martin Atkinson technical engineer
Terry Bennell editor
This article also appears here.
Wishing a very happy eighty-fifth birthday to the remarkable Estonian composer Arvo Pärt!
Following the first Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances of the composer’s Third Symphony in 1989, John von Rhein wrote in the Chicago Tribune, “We must be grateful to Neeme Järvi [to whom the work was dedicated] for introducing us to this fascinating and utterly individual composer, and for doing so in a performance of such power, accuracy, and dedication. . . . [Pärt’s] spare ritualistic austerity (deeply rooted in medieval modes and harmonies) [is] strongly beholden to the cadences of Machaut and other fourteenth and fifteenth-century music [and] speaks with a communicative fervor.”
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra has performed several works by Pärt in Orchestra Hall, at the Ravinia Festival, and at Wheaton College. A complete list of performances is below.
November 22, 24, 25, and 28, 1989, Orchestra Hall
PÄRT Symphony No. 3
Neeme Järvi, conductor
July 18, 1992, Ravinia Festival
PÄRT Symphony No. 2
James Conlon, conductor
April 15, 16, 17, 18, and 21, 1998, Orchestra Hall
PÄRT Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten
Donald Runnicles, conductor
May 6, 7, and 8, 2004, Orchestra Hall
PÄRT Fratres
Christoph von Dohnányi, conductor
Yuan-Qing Yu, violin
January 22, 23, and 24, 2009, Orchestra Hall
PÄRT Symphony No. 4 (Los Angeles)
Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductor
February 11, 12, 13, and 16, 2016, Orchestra Hall
PÄRT Orient & Occident
Gennady Rozhdestvensky, conductor
April 20, 22, and 23, 2017, Orchestra Hall
April 21, 2017, Edman Memorial Chapel, Wheaton College
PÄRT Fratres
Neeme Järvi, conductor
Robert Chen, violin
Happy, happy birthday!
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Using a single Telefunken condenser microphone—hung twenty-five feet directly above the conductor’s podium—Mercury recorded Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition on April 23, 1951, at Orchestra Hall. Rafael Kubelík, in his first season as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s fifth music director, conducted, and Adolph Herseth, principal trumpet since 1948, performed the opening fanfare. The recording was the inaugural release on Mercury’s Living Presence series.
In 1996, the original masters were used to transfer the recording to compact disc. In the liner notes for the Mercury rerelease, Robert C. Marsh commented that the original discs “represented the highest state of the art in monophonic recording technique. Hearing them again, some forty-five years later, one is still astonished by the degree to which they project the performers into the presence of the listener, a phenomenon noted in the early reviews by New York Times critic Howard Taubman [who originally coined the phrase ‘living presence’]. . . . Indeed, heard over multiple speaker systems there have always been passages in these recordings in which one is easily convinced that he is, in fact, listening to stereo. The balance, clarity, and texture of the music is so beautifully preserved, the dynamic range is so wide and so free of the compression often associated with monophonic records, that it is difficult to accept that all this sound comes from a monophonic source.”
The Orchestra also recorded Pictures in 1957 for RCA with Fritz Reiner conducting, in 1967 for RCA with Seiji Ozawa, in 1976 for Deutsche Grammophon with Carlo Maria Giulini, in 1980 for London Records with Sir Georg Solti, and in 1989 for Chandos with Neeme Järvi. The Reiner and Järvi versions were recorded at Orchestra Hall; Ozawa, Giulini, and Solti recorded at Medinah Temple. A performance video recorded at Suntory Hall in Tokyo on April 15, 1990—which also included an introduction with Solti performing examples at the piano and in rehearsal with the Orchestra—was released by London. On all recordings, Herseth performed the opening fanfare.
This article also appears here.