New York Recordings of Ferrier on SOMM

courtesy of Naxos of America

Those who have been reading this site for some time may know that SOMM Recordings, based in Surrey in England, has been remastering archival recordings of the English contralto Kathleen Ferrier and releasing them on CDs. The first of those releases, Kathleen Ferrier remembered came out in June of 2017, followed by an album of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach this past May. The title of the latest project is Kathleen Ferrier in New York; and, once again, serious listeners have to contend with the vagaries of Amazon.com, which has decided to release the content only as an MP3 album. Those interested in a physical copy of this recording will have to go to its Web page on the amazon.co.uk Web site.

The major selection on this new album is a live concert recording of Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde performed by the New York Philharmonic conducted by Bruno Walter in Carnegie Hall of January 18, 1948. Ferrier is joined by tenor Set Svanholm in this performance. This has been released in the past on other CD labels (which can be found on Amazon.com); but, as was stated at the outset, the SOMM releases are products of recent remastering efforts. The album also includes three recordings made at the Town Hall recital on January 8, 1950 with John Newmark accompanying Ferrier at the piano.

I knew that Ferrier’s touring had taken her to the United States. However, until I encountered the SOMM release, I had thought that the only recorded document from our country was made at a 1949 party in New York at which a decidedly more than tipsy Ferrier accompanied herself at the piano rendering a few chestnuts from her childhood. This was released on a Gala album entitled Songs My Father Taught Me. Thus we have SOMM to thank for providing a “real” account of Ferrier’s visits to New York.

From a personal point of view, the timing has provided me with another perspective on Bruno Walter’s conducting; and the Mahler tracks are both preceded and followed by Arnold Michaelis interviewing Walter at his home in Hollywood in 1956. The topics of the interview included Mahler and Anton Bruckner, as well as Ferrier. Where the Mahler selection is concerned, there has always been a copy of the 1952 Decca recording with Walter conducting the Vienna Philharmonic, with Julius Patzak taking the tenor songs. Much has been made of Patzak being past his prime. Svanholm’s account may be more solid; but he has a tendency to exaggerate his rhetoric, which is most apparent in the opening song.

Where the Town Hall Bach selections are concerned, I have already observed that Ferrier’s approaches pre-date any serious commitment to “historically informed” performance. My reaction to the tracks on this album fall into the it-is-what-it-is evaluation category. Nevertheless, I was glad to see that SOMM took the trouble to identify “Bist du bei mir geh ich mit Freuden” as having been composed by Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel, even if it is best known because Bach copied it into the notebook he compiled for Anna Magdalena (resulting in the BWV 508 catalog number that was subsequently withdrawn). Apparently the staff at SOMM is as “historically informed” about the eighteenth century as they are about the twentieth!