1929 RICHARD STRAUSS conducts DON JUAN Berlin State Opera Orch BRUNSWICK 90046/7
$
25
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Description
A series of great early Opera performances: From 1902 G&Ts to 40s wartime German records:
RICHARD STRAUSS in his first recording of Tone Poem DON JUAN
conducts the Berlin State Opera Orch
2x12" 78 rpm record
Condition:
EXCELLENT close to pristine faint rubs plays very quiet, faint crackles
A GREAT COPY
Richard Strauss’s only American recordings were made for the Brunswick label during his concert tour in the winter of 1921-22. Because Brunswick was headquartered in Chicago, it was long assumed that the recordings were made there, perhaps with the Chicago Symphony appearing under a nom de disque for contractual reasons. However, Ross Laird’s Brunswick exhaustive Brunswick discography places the recording venue in New York City. As Strauss’s appearances there in December, 1921 were with Walter Damrosch’s New York Symphony, that may well have been the anonymous ensemble heard here.
The noisier, more distant sound of the Brunswick Salome Dance is indicative of a Pantographic dubbing, which may have been made to bring the playback speed up to 78.3 rpm. (The Bourgeois Gentilhomme disc, recorded at the same session, plays at a lower speed; it is not clear why this, too, wasn’t dubbed.)
The following month saw Strauss in London, making his first British recordings for Columbia with the LSO. A photograph taken during the recording session shows that horn-amplified Stroh violins were not used, which may account for the distant balance of the strings on these discs. Columbia apparently enforced a four-minute limit on 12-inch sides at this time, which required cuts in Don Juan (on Side 2) and in the Otto Singer arrangement of Rosenkavalier Waltzes. The take of the second side of the waltzes presented here appears to be different from the one listed in the Peter Morse Strauss discography and the Ronald Taylor Columbia discography, both of which show Take 2 published for this side.
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