Sokowski: Tchaikovsky Hamlet & Francesca da Rimini-Everest SDBR-3011 (Sealed)

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FORMAT: 12" 33 RPM LP
ARTIST: ABOVE
TITLE:  ABOVE
LABEL:SEALED
NUMBER: SDBR-3011
MONO/STEREO: STEREO

LABEL DESCRIPTION: SEALED

GRADE & DESCRIPTION (COVER):  NM SEALED

GRADE & DESCRIPTION (RECORD): SEALED

NOTES: you can see the old sales sticker on shrank wrap. It is from Wallichs Music City Hollywood which operated from 1940 to 1978. This is the real deal

This extraordinary and famous LP – a still-sealed copy – from Everest (SDBR-3011, US pressing, label iteration unknown, stereo) features Leopold Stokowski and the Stadium Symphony Orchestra of New York (the NYPO) in incandescent accounts of Tchaikovsky’s Francesca da Rimini · Fantasia for Orchestra Op. 32 and Hamlet (Overture and Fantasy), both recorded in the spacious acoustics of Manhattan Center, New York in October 1958 (producers: Harry D. Belock and Raoul Poliakin / engineers: Berty Whyte and Aaron Nathanson). 

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Wrote the critic D.C. in his review for February 1960 issue of The Gramophone:

“Stokowski conducting the Stadium Symphony Orchestra of New York playing Tchaikovsky" shouts the sleeve-note at you —and for once it's true, they are playing Tchaikovsky, not Tchaikovslcy-arrangedStokowski. And, what's more, they're playing it magnificently. Having often gunned for Stokowski in my time, on account of his pervasive vulgarity, I'm glad to be able to say that these performances are really, as he would no doubt put it, "stoopendous". When this conductor is at his best, there are very few in the world to touch him.

“The music, of course, suits him down to the ground. Both works are packed full of the most violent romantic turmoil—whirling string and wind figurations shot through with jaggedfortissimo barkings of brass—and Stokowski brings to all this a precision, drive and intensity that one can only marvel at (the storm in Francesca has to be heard to be believed). His fantastic showmanship comes into its own here, for the music is of the super-rhetorical kind that needs it to make its full impact. Equally astounding is the masterly handling of the lyrical elements: in Hamlet, the aching passion of the "Ophelia" theme is brought out to the full without any vulgarisation, and in Francesca, the quite different lovetheme—a quiet, melancholy, haunting clarinet melody—is shaped with rare gentleness and sensibility. Most important of all, the various contrasting elements are integrated, in each case, into a performance which is a unified whole, moving from start to finish with a single impulse. These are performances in a million; to hear these rarely-played and much-disparaged works played like this is to realise that Tchaikovsky was one of the very great, who could meet Dante and Shakespeare on their own level.

“The recording is one of enormous power— not at all comfortable to cope with in a small room—and is quite an achievement in hi-fl. For once, the multi-microphone technique beloved by Stokowski seems to have been replaced by a more overall type of balance, in which, nevertheless, practically every part of the score stands out in vivid relief. A few solo passages are, it is true, more prominent than they would be in the concert hall, but if the wind statements of the "Ophelia" theme have been boosted, perhaps it is just as well, in view of Tchaikovsky's obscuring string texture, and if the strings get lost at letter N in Hamlet, it's surely Tchaikovsky's fault, with his fff trombones.”

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