A delightful discovery in the Marchant 3M Tape Archives - a radio broadcast in 1951 of Beethoven’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D Major (1806, op 61). Featured soloist Nathan Milstein - generally considered one of the greatest violinists of the 20th century. NY Philharmonic conducted by George Szell. Reynolds Marchant recorded this off the radio, like a few other videos on my channel. This is a CBS radio broadcast from Carnegie Hall, recorded live off air from WCCO Minneapolis onto reel to reel.
There are several recordings of Milstein playing this Concerto with the NY Philharmonic that I have found, but this is I believe the earliest. And - in fact this appears to be the ONLY recording of this performance, unless it is in a NY Philharmonic archive somewhere unreleased. I found no evidence of it on vinyl or shellac, or on youtube. Like some of my reels recorded off the radio the quality isn’t the best. But given the apparent historic nature of this performance I wanted to get it out there. I did some significant audio cleanup using Waves tools, but not as much as was needed for the Mischa Elman performance.
Unfortunately there is a brief dropout in the recording for 6 seconds from 4:02 to 4:08 but other than that it doesn’t sound too bad - what do you think? You can also hear the audience clapping after the first movement! It does happen sometimes. That applause was quickly faded out either by the radio broadcaster or Marchant, as the 2nd and 3rd movements were on the other “side” of the reel.
Thanks to the NY Philharmonic’s awesome archive you can see the program for the performance here (!):
archives.nyphil.org/index.php...
Technical Info:
Scotch 111 A
7" Cine reel
7 1/2 IPS
Boosted gain during recording
Significant audio processing to remove crackle, noise, and attempt to remove distortion.
Movements 2 and 3 were on a different side of the reel and were pitched slightly up so pitch correction was needed.
00:00 - Brief intro by Jim Fassett
00:03 - Allegro ma non troppo
23:04 - Larghetto
32:48 - Rondo. Allegro
21 июл 2024
