On Fri, 10 Jul 2009 08:25:38 -0700, Stephen McElroy wrote
(in article ):
In article ,
Sonnova wrote:
That's intersting, becase according to 'Perfecting Sound Forever',
Stokowski
was all about
radically processing the recorded sound to make it 'better' than live.
Yeah, and Stokowski (real name Leo Stokes. Father was a coal miner from
Wales) was a pretentious loon. He insisted that RCA Victor let him adjust
the
levels on his Philadelphia Orchestra recording sessions. Of course, RCA
wasn't about to let him do that, so they gave him a VU meter with a knob
attached to it. All the knob did was vary the level of the meter, nothing
else. Stokowski would conduct and twiddle the knob to his heart's content.
On
playback. he would beam and say to the engineers: "See this is perfect,
this
is how it SHOULD be done. Why can't you overpaid recording engineers do
that?" The "overpaid recording engineers" would smile at each other and
wink.
OTOH, Stokowski WAS responsible for talking Musicians Union maven James C,
Patrillo out of doubling the recording fees for stereophonic recording
sessions (two channels? Two recordings)! Another Stokowski story that I
recall was that when he was the resident conductor of the Dallas Symphony
in
the late 1960's, he decided to marry the local Dallas Opera diva, a soprano
with a very plain name Jane Smith or some such (I don't remember her name).
Before he would marry her, he made her LEGALLY change her name to Countess
Vlotovsky or some such pretentious nonsense. He as a character. His
pretensions to technical audio knowledge are legendary, but he did promote
technical innovation in both the production and playback of recorded music.
The public trusted him as a famous "authority" and so he did a lot of good
for the business and the hobby. He wasn't a bad conductor either - as long
as he didn't try to "re-arrange" the works of the masters (which
unfortunately, he did all too often). His recording of the Virgil Thompson
Suites from "The River" and "The PLow That Broke The Plains" are THE best
recordings of those works and the only recording of them formally
acknowledged by the composer.
From wiki:
After Stokowski's death, Tom Burnam writes, the "concatenization of
canards" that had arisen around him was revived‹that his name and accent
were phony; that his musical education was deficient; that his musicians
did not respect him; that he cared about nobody but himself. Burnam
suggests that there was a dark, hidden reason for these rumors.
Stokowski deplored the segregation of symphony orchestras in which women
and minorities were excluded, and, so Burnam claims, the bigots got
revenge by slandering Stokowski.
Well, many people believed these stories, including some famous musicologists
such as Nicolas Slonimsky, which is where I got the stories about his "real
name" and his requiring his fiance to change her name.
--
http://www.stokowski.org/Leopold%20S...0Biography.htm
This page includes an image of his birth certificate.
Stokowski's first wife, Olga Samaroff, was born Lucy Mary Olga Agnes
Hickenlooper but performed under her stage name for years before their
marriage.
Touching up scores was standard practice for the early twentieth
century. Please provide an example of a "re-arrangement" that showed he
was a "bad conductor."
Sorry, I never stated nor even implicated that I thought he was a bad
conductor. He wasn't. Like I said yesterday, his recording, on Vanguard, of
the two Virgil Thompson pieces is considered definitive. But I don't
particularly care for his "arrangements" of Beethoven's 9th or Bach's D minor
Cantata and Fugue. That doesn't mean that his recordings of these
arrangements are in any way deficient or sloppy. But when I'm following the
score of a Beethoven symphony while listening to it and find that the
conductor has done such things as change the order of certain passages or
skipped repeats altogether, why, I tend to get a little testy. 8^)