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Moving-coil cartridges
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^) |
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