One week from today Sony Classical will release Beyond the Music, a fifteen-CD collection of all the recordings made by contralto Marian Anderson for RCA Victor. As expected, Amazon.com has already created a Web page for pre-orders. Ironically, at the beginning of this week, one of the San Francisco Public Television channels aired the PBS documentary Once In A Hundred Years: The Life And Legacy Of Marian Anderson. The good news is that this film provided a reasonably informative biography of Anderson, with particular attention to her involvement with the civil rights movement during the twentieth century. The not-so-good news was that all of that attention left opportunities to listen to Anderson in performance to a painful minimum; and the really-bad news involved two interminable pledge breaks that disrupted the compelling flow of the account of Anderson’s biography.
While I am not sure why Sony Music Masterworks scheduled the release of this anthology for this particular month, for those of us in San Francisco it definitely is the perfect way to balance the experience of watching Once In A Hundred Years. Indeed, the last of the fifteen CDs is an audio documentary about Anderson. The Lady from Philadelphia was originally released as the “original soundtrack” of a See It Now television program produced by Edward R. Murrow and Fred W. Friendly. Five of the CDs present the more “popular” side of Anderson’s repertoire, consisting of spirituals and carols. That leaves nine CDs in the “serious music” category; and, while there are some disappointments and shortcomings, the tracks on these albums serve well as the “mother lode” of opportunities of appreciate Anderson’s talent.
Some may argue that the scope of these opportunities is narrower than one might wish. They may question whether one really needs three performances of Johannes Brahms’ Opus 53 “Alto Rhapsody.” For my own part, I am happy to engage in “side-by-side” listening to appreciate how Anderson worked with three different conductors: Eugene Ormandy with the Philadelphia Orchestra (January 8, 1939), Pierre Monteux with the San Francisco Symphony (March 3, 1945), and Fritz Reiner with the RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra (October 20, 1950). Similarly, there are art songs that recur in different settings, such as Franz Schubert’s D. 550 “Die Forelle” (the trout). On the other hand there is a 1936 recording of two songs by Jean Sibelius, which are (thankfully) performed in the original Swedish texts. (It probably helped that Anderson’s accompanist for these two tracks, Kosti Vehanen, was Finnish.)
For the most part my disappointments do not involve the performances themselves. However, thanks to The Lady from Philadelphia, I could appreciate the ironic subtext of the recording of Anderson’s Farewell Recital, which took place at Constitution Hall in Washington on October 24, 1964. The irony has to do with the fact that Constitution Hall was owned and managed by the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR). When Sol Hurok wanted to book Anderson for a concert in Constitution Hall on April 9, 1939, he was denied permission, because the DAR had a “white-performers only” policy.
The audience for Marian Anderson’s performance at the Lincoln Memorial (provided by the United States Information Agency, photographer unknown, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)
As one might guess, the backlash was formidable. It included First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt resigning from the DAR and the beginning of her enduring friendship with Anderson. The result was that the concert took place on the arranged date, but it was held outdoors on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Looking at the photograph of the audience for that performance today, it is hard not to associate it with Martin Luther King’s March on Washington in 1963, when he delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech from the same venue to an equally massive audience.
Nevertheless, this collection is not about either politics or race relations. It is about the prodigious contralto talent of an American vocalist, whose only basis for comparison would probably be Lancashire-born Kathleen Ferrier. In that context I find myself disappointed that Anderson does not seem to have crossed paths with Bruno Walter, who played such as significant role in Ferrier’s career. However, when there are so many engaging listening experiences in the Anderson collection, why quibble about what might have been?
No comments:
Post a Comment