Note-Perfect: Thirty Years in Classical Music Recordings

By Giveon Cornfield

When you play a recording, have you ever paused to think about what went into making of it? Rest assured: there is more here than meets the eye and ear. This book takes an irreverent behind-the-scenes look at the classical record business. The author draws on three decades in recording and broadcasting to tell the story of his own and other classical record labels. This amusing and informative memoir covers recording and editing techniques, and how albums are planned, made and marketed. So are broadcast programming, press reviews and awards in short, every facet of this fascinating industry.

The pages of Note-Perfect are populated by musical legends like Yehudi Menuhin, Jean-Pierre Rampal, Nicolas Slonimsky, Ernst Krenek and hundreds of other artists and composers. You will even meet unlikely personalities such as David Ben-Gurion and Arnold Toynbee, captured in sound for posterity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 18, 2013
• ISBN: 9781479777983

Giveon Cornfield

GIVEON CORNFIELD, PH.D. came to Israel (then Palestine) as a child in 1933 and was educated there. He was a member of the Hagana before WWII, during which he served in the Royal Air Force in North Africa. After the war, he rejoined Hagana, which was incorporated into the Israel Defence Forces in 1948, and served in the IDF. In 1952 he moved with his family to Canada, where he worked in the automotive and broadcasting fields. He founded BAROQUE RECORDS in Montreal, later incorporated into ORION MASTER RECORDINGS* following his move to the USA. He has produced over 1,000 albums of classical music on his own and other labels. In addition to hundreds of articles, recordings and concert reviews, Cornfield’s books include LILIAN - ISRAEL’S FIRST LADY OF CUISINE and NOTE-PERFECT (Thirty years in classical music recordings), also available from XLIBRIS. * WWW.NAXOSMUSIC LIBRARY.COM/ORION WWW.CLASSICSONLINE.COM/ORION

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Copyright © 2013 by Giveon Cornfield.

ISBN:

Softcover   978-1-4797-7797-6

Ebook        978-1-4797-7798-3

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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CONTENTS

A Note About ‘Note-Perfect’

Foreword

I

1    Beginnings

2    Laying The Foundation

3    Canadian Baroque

II

4    The Making Of A Record

5    Kenneth Gilbert And Friends

6    Jean-Pierre Rampal

7    Music From Belgium

8    Mario Duschenes

9    Esteemed Colleagues

10   Violinist-Conductors

11   Steven Staryk

12   A Lion In Winter

13   Making Time (Magazine)

14   Liszt’s Heritage

15   Fossil Or Nation?

16   Mixed Feelings

17   Vive Le Quebec Libre!

18   Guests From Abroad

19   Imported Talent

20   An Ethnic Touch

III

21   Orion’s Constellation

22   City Of Angels

23   Orion Ascending

24   Thesaurus Rex

25   Musical Chameleon

26   The Menuhin Foundation

27   One-Man Institution

28   Tune-Smiths

29   Avant-Garde

30   Beethoven Wrote Only Five Piano Concertos?

31   Louis And Annette Kaufman

32   The Hungarian Club

33   The Grands Prix

34   The Israeli Club

IV

35   Entrepreneurs

36   Mostly Strings

37   The Pelican’s Song

38   The Hard Sell

Postscript

For Nicolas, in friendship and admiration

A NOTE ABOUT ‘NOTE-PERFECT’

Books about music and musicians are usually written by professionals and read by other professionals. This book by Giveon Cornfield is about a wide variety of musical matters. The author is a music lover in the broadest sense of the word, and what is most important for readers of this book is that he is also knowledgeable in various cultural fields. When he started his professional work as a producer and publisher of records, he called his collection Orion , suggesting a universe of sound. He never limited himself to one particular field of music, and he arranged his concordance according to a variety of tastes and sounds. The music lover will find in Cornfield’s discourse many works that are not generally known to the average professional in the field.

Born in Montreal, Canada, Giveon Cornfield absorbed a natural fluency in English and French, but growing up in Israel, he also mastered Hebrew and other languages, a unique advantage which lends him profound understanding of the political and cultural problems involving the near East.

My association with Giveon has been long and most cordial. The episodes that he mentions in his manuscript recall years of friendship and musicians we knew well. Some memories recalled by Giveon are particularly poignant, such as the final farewell to a mutual friend, the composer Vladimir Dukelsky (Vernon Duke). Giveon recalls the farewell kiss, Russian fashion, given to Duke at his funeral by another Russian, the pianist Vladimir Pleshakov. Vernon Duke’s early death was all the more painful because he left his much younger wife who herself was a fine performing musician, a singer. Memories, memories where where will they cease to be so melancholy, so dolorous. Giveon Cornfield’s book remains a living memorial to our mutual friends in music.

Nicolas Slonimsky

September 1992

FOREWORD

Writing a book is easier than finding a suitable title for it. The inspiration for my partly—borrowed title came from that used by my good friend and musical mentor Nicolas Slonimsky, in his autobiography Perfect Pitch (Oxford University Press, 1988)

I have tried to keep Note-Perfect as non-technical as possible. The use of some recording and musical terminology was, alas, unavoidable, and for that my apologies.

My special thanks to Dr. Loretta Petrie for her excellent suggestions and superb copyreading. For those still reading these lines, let me quickly add that this book is not a detailed analysis of the thousand or so albums I am guilty of inflicting on record collectors. I beg forgiveness of those artists not included, and forbearance from others who might not agree with me.

G.C.

1

BEGINNINGS

Incurable Discophilia

What makes a person want to make a living recording classical music? That’s a question I have often been asked. As any fool can tell you, there is no money in it. Ergo, I am such a fool, who went into this business willingly, and stayed with it for more than three decades. There are a few others like me. Some have even sought my advice, ignoring it and plunging right in.

What made me do it? There is no simple answer. Rather, I would say that what attracted me to this work was a deep love of music, and wanting to play an instrument so badly it almost hurt. I mean really play. That, alas, remains an unfulfilled wish. So I turned to recorders. Frans Brueggen, Michala Petri, Mario Duschenes and other masters of the instrument notwithstanding, the recorder somehow lacks full legitimacy. I can hold my own in the company of fellow-tootlers, but can say (in all modesty) that I am a virtuoso of the tape recorder. In any other language, these instruments have unambiguous names. Only the English term leads to unintentional puns. This eventually led to the founding of a record label in Canada, then another in the United States. I accept full responsibility—for better or fort worse—for about a thousand albums, produced over a span of thirty years. During this time, I’ve had the privilege of working with some of the most delightful people imaginable. Their music and friendship continue as a neverending source of pleasure. The work in which I engaged opened for me doors that were closed in my youth, and has given me much joy and fulfillment. Could anyone ask for more? I am indeed a most happy fellow.

My fascination with music began when I was eight. That was in 1935, a year or so after my parents and I left America. (They should have known better, but nevertheless took me along). We came—returned in their case—to the Land of Israel. It was called Palestine then, a tiny speck in the vast British Empire. A newcomer soon got the feeling that the Brits had been here for a long, long time. No one dreamed they would ever leave. It was not so much the British mandate as such that was so obviously present, as was the feeling of Colony, the British and the Natives, the Empire with its oppressive baggage of custom, rules and prejudices. The Arabs were openly favored in all areas of the Administration, for political reasons. They were loud, exotic, and masters of duplicity. The Jews were, by and large, a rather serious lot who frowned on levity—only natural after two millennia of exile, ghettos and persecution. They were by no means colorful, and were fired by a work-ethic that bordered on the fanatical. Nor were they good at fawning and simpering. Worse yet, they were not easily fooled, and hardly drank!

My folks had lived in Jerusalem from the time they were married until they temporarily left for Montreal in 1926. It was all my fault, you see: I was making trouble for them even before I was born. My Canadian mother was terrified at the thought of giving birth to a child in a house that had no electricity or running water, and of being attended by an Arab midwife! It has crossed my mind that I might have been an unmusical accidental. At any rate, that is how I happened to come full circle: Made in Jerusalem, born in Montreal, and now in 1933, back at the source.

We lived in Tel Aviv, which was dusty, noisy, and hot and muggy most of the year. Winters were nastily wet and cold, since very few houses were heated. Tel Aviv lacked character. The port city of Haifa up the coast had much more charm, especially the part that climbed the slopes of Mount Carmel. Few, however, would dispute that Jerusalem was the gem of the land. Not only Jersalemites, but anyone who lived elsewhere, regarded Tel-Avivians as poor cousins. Theirs was a young city, populated largely by newcomers. Most buildings and businesses were relatively new, and except for the northern part of town, where German Jews were concentrated, the city simply had no class. Jerusalem, on the other hand, is like a beautiful woman who, although advanced in years, still bears her age gracefully. In the soft light of dawn, even more so at sunset, the city is bathed in a golden hue, inspiring many popular songs, such as Jerusalem of Gold. There were Jewish families here with deep roots, and the wealth that came from generations of continued residence. The pace of life in Jerusalem was measured. There was a sense of continuity, of dignity and culture.

My folks often visited Jerusalem, where they had many friends. Once, I was taken along to tea at their old friends the Bassans. If there had been an aristocracy in egalitarian Eretz Israel, then surely the Maurice Bassans would qualify as members. Their elegant villa in the suburb of Rehavia, seen through the eyes of a Tel Aviv apartment dweller, was truly impressive. Its neat appearance and welltended grounds conveyed a feeling of stability and civic pride. I was quite unprepared, however, for what I saw upon entering the salon. Here was something that I did not even know existed: An entire wall, floor to ceiling, lined with record albums! A library ladder stood by the record shelves, and nearby was the gramophone, a quality modern instrument housed in a console. It had louvered doors to control the volume and direction of sound, as in a church organ. I was smitten! I know now that it was on that afternoon so long ago that I contracted incurable discophilia.

Early in life I had only limited access to good music. What little I heard over the radio (once we got one) was what the British considered suitable fare for the natives: Suppe’s Poet and Peasant Overture, Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody, And Britishisms like The Whistler and his Dog and Ketelby’s In a Chinese Temple Garden and In a Persian Market, with its not inappropriate refrain of Baksheesh, Baksheesh. Friday evenings were better, when symphonic works and the occasional concerto would be aired late into the night; 10 P.M. was sign-off time. There was little else, but that sampling was enough to whet my appetite for more. Those long years of yearning—time moves slowly for the young—gave me a lifelong healthy appetite for music. Like sex. Other than Strauss waltzes and such heard schmaltzingly played in sidewalk cafes, I had heard no live music until some years later. Then the newly-founded Palestine Orchestra, led by Sir Malcolm Sargent, gave a series of Youth Concerts. That good shepherd gently led his his young audiences into pastures of delight, the world of classical music.

I wanted to learn to play the piano, but my folks claimed we did not have the room (or money) for one. My insistence only yielded a violin, that I hated even before I began making those awful scraping sounds. My next-door neighbor and school classmate was Werner Torkanowsky, with whom I walked to and from school. The Torkanowskys were German Jews. Werner’s father was a physician, had a pleasant baritone voice, and was a good amateur ‘cellist. Mrs. T., a tall lady with an aristocratic bearing, taught piano. Werner was a serious violin student who sported the classic fiddler’s callus under his chin, the result of endless hours of practice. It was in the Torkanowsky’s home that I discovered chamber music. I soon realized that I could never play the violin nearly as well as Werner, who was a real show-off. Mercifully, I was allowed to give it up. Although he would grow up to serve in the commandos, Werner as a kid was pretty soft. One summer night I talked him into joining me in sneaking over the fence of the municipal pool for a dip. It was not a real swimming pool, but an irrigation cistern for watering the orange groves surrounding it. As a result of our escapade, poor Werner caught double pneumonia. To his credit, he never squealed, yet to this day I harbor guilty feelings about it. More on Werner later.

A family friend gave me a portable wind-up Victrola for my Bar-Mitzvah. Now I had to get some records, not a simple matter during wartime. My mother, a dietitian, had a radio program and newspaper columns on nutrition, diet and cuisine. I earned pocket money translating this material into Hebrew, as she had never quite mastered the language. I also talked my folks into letting me take over housecleaning duties—for a nominal fee. With these ‘funds’ I could indulge in the unheard-of luxury of actually buying records! I haunted the flea-markets and second-hand stores, riding home on my bicycle one-handed, clutching in the other my musical treasures. I remember my first acquisition: A two-record set of 10 inch 78’s, Walter Susskind conducting Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.

Ever so slowly, I added to my collection of basic repertoire. The performances on those records must have been uniformly good, as I can’t remember one I didn’t like. Young ears are not to be underestimated; I could recognize poor playing immediately—mine especially. Yet I must have been favorably predisposed, since those recordings after all represented a considerable capital outlay. I played them over and over until I knew each note and nuance intimately. They haunt me still: When I hear a performance that is radically different from one on which I cut my teeth, I feel uncomfortable.

Playing the records wasn’t all that simple, either. A box of steel needles, good for two or three plays each, cost a small fortune. I observed that cactus spines were about the same diameter, and knew from painful experience that they were very hard. They grew everywhere, and there was an additional bonus: The softer, organic medium yielded a smoother tone, although at a reduced level. Cactus needles were only good for about half a side before they wore out. Patiently, I’d wait for a phrase-ending, change the needle, and go on. In due course, I got an electric pick-up—weighing a ton!—which I connected to our radio. Now I had electronic reproduction: a speaker with volume control! Those scratchy old records and primitive audio sounded pretty awful, but that’s what I had. All that tinkering to improve the sound became in time an obsession. Even now I still patch, modify and otherwise fiddle about with my audio equipment. Am I ever satisfied? Don’t be silly! No man-made system can ever truly substitute for the real thing. To quote the formidable Nicolas Slonimsky: But experiments continue.

The collection grew steadily. There was a hiatus of a couple of years while I served in the R.A.F. during the war, repairing bomber engines. I was stationed at No. 107 Maintenance Unit in Qasfarit. This was on the shore of the Great Bitter Lake, that formed part of the Suez Canal. On our base we had a recreation room with a decent phonograph, plenty of needles, and an assortment of records. I got myself appointed guardian of this treasure, and began sorting out the classics from the dance music and hit records. Some were broken, and a few were missing from sets. I assembled a nucleus that enabled me to present music-appreciation evenings to my fellow music-lovers. What little I knew about the music was more than average, so I passed for an expert.

We continued this custom when I got out of military service in 1946. After I was married, we would hold open house every Thursday evening. No one had telephones then, so friends would simply drop in for music and refreshments. In 1952, we carefully packed our record collection, books and a few other possessions, and left, my wife Marion, four year-old son Eitan and I, for Montreal. After years of hardship and two wars—Israel’s War of Independence followed hard on the heels of WWII—we were ready for a change of scenery.

Long-playing records were just beginning to trickle into Israel, and a fellow-collector sold me all his 78’s shortly before we left. Miraculously, only one or two records broke in transit, although we lost some nice Daume and Galle glass pieces. In Montreal, I discovered a record shop nearby that was liquidating its stock of 78’s below cost. The collection thus got a sudden infusion of brand-new records. Storage in our small apartment was becoming a problem. Before very long, I got a three-speed record player. I couldn’t help noticing, even with that low-fidelity equipment, that London FFRR (Full Frequency Range Recording) Records sounded a lot better than most others. Strings had a smooth sheen, brasses sounded bright, and even harpsichord continuo came through in baroque music, as did the chuff on tracker-action organ recordings.

There were not that many LP labels in the early fifties. The majors of course had the resources and catalogs for launching their LPs in style. Moreover, they had pop artists on their rosters. Profits from the sale of pop records covered the cost of releasing the less profitable classics. Columbia and RCA Victor combed their archives for budget releases, which offered the convenience of uninterrupted play of complete symphonic works and operas. Then there were the independent classical labels, notably Vox, Vanguard and Westminster, that had many fine-sounding recordings of less frequently played works. High-Fidelity in those days meant mainly high frequencies, absent from most 78’s. By present-day standards, they sound pretty shrill. Smaller labels, such as Cambridge, Concert Hall, Period/Renaissance, Oceanic, Urania and others catered to esoteric tastes by exploring the byways of ancient and classical music. There were recordings of Bachs other than J.S., Michael Haydn (elder brother), Beethoven’s youthful Concerto in Eb (1784) and the Sixth Piano Concerto. This was LVB’s own arrangement of the D Major Violin Concerto—which in fact preceded the publication of Op. 61—that kind of repertoire.

One of the pioneers in budget classical was Don Gabor, who offered well-recorded, respectable performances of standard orchestral fare at $1.99 list on his Remington label. Most others were priced at $5.98. This label also offered a few chamber music recordings and all were well enough packaged and pressed. Other budget labels catered to the supermarket trade: Allegro (gravelly pressings) featured the classical Hit Parade, and Coliseum had an all-Soviet artist roster. Rumor had it that they taped live performances off the air in Helsinki, near the Russian border. The Soviets were not at that time signatories to the International Copyright Convention, and were helping themselves to western performances without royalty accounting. It was a free-for-all for those who wished to indulge in piracy.

About that time I met Jacob Siskind, one of the two music critics and record columnists at the Montreal Star. The senior critic was Eric McLean, who was later instrumental in getting the revival of Old Montreal underway. Jacob also taught piano, and I thought he played beautifully. When I asked why he was not pursuing a concert career, he shrugged and said he Didn’t have it in him. I liked and admired Jacob, but he was such a born pessimist, a perennial dispenser of blahs. His standard reply to ‘How are you?’ was invariably ‘terrible’, spoken with conviction. He was curious about my dual identity—I operated an auto repair shop by day, turning Jekyll-and-Hyde fashion into a music dilettante after hours.

I took some piano lessons from Jacob, working very hard at it until I got my first tape recorder. Then I quit in horror. Our son Eitan and daughter Eleanor, who was born in Montreal, also studied with Jake for a while. But his sarcasm and down-at-the-mouth approach didn’t go over well with kids. Nevertheless, we became good friends, and in due course Jake would let me do occasional concert reviews for the Star. That meant going downtown to the newsroom after the concert and writing a review, which was printed the following day. Marion understandably hated it, having to sit in that dingy, smoke-filled office, while I faked an authoritative-sounding review of the concert.

Jake’s record collection was on the heroic scale: Not one, but three walls of the room were lined with albums. The floor, he informed me, had to be reinforced from below to sustain the weight of all those 78’s. LPs were stored in another room. Jake had one of the first state-of-the-art stereo systems in Montreal. It was all-Quad, a very fine (and expensive) British make, with huge electrostatic speakers, that required an hour to warm up for optimum performance. I had never heard anything that loud except in a theater. Jake was good enough to give me extra copies and records he did not want, to my everlasting gratitude. From time to time he’d hold soirees, which I did not find very enjoyable. He loved vintage recordings, and liked to compare the relative merits of the same piece of music as recorded by several artists. This can be interesting, but only in limited doses. Listening to music at home is an intimate pastime, that seldom benefits from sharing with friends.

Montreal at this point was a decade away from the swinging metropolis it was to become with Expo ’67. Serious shopping was done in Boston or New York, where prices and selection were much better. I discovered a place on 6th Avenue in New York where new LPs—minus jackets and with a small hole drilled through the label—sold for $1.69. These were overruns or surplus, I believe. No major labels there, but the major-minors were well represented. At a slightly higher price, they also had goodies such as the Westminster Laboratory Series, in zippered vinyl covers. Apropos goodies, no record-hunting expedition in New York was complete without a visit to the Record Hunter on 5th Avenue, or to Sam Goody’s. If there was a recording one just had to have, Goody’s was the place to find it. It took ten hours or so to drive from Montreal to New York, via Route 9 through the Adirondacks. After the New York Thruway was opened, the trip became much faster and safer. Jake joined us a few times, and we took turns at the wheel. His was an advanced case of irreversible discophilia. That affliction should not interfere with one’s driving abilities, but he was steering on the way back to Montreal when we ran into a snowstorm. He must have been drowsy and misjudged a turn in the road, and we skidded into a snowbank. No harm done—it