LOOKING BACK

June 1924 saw the opening of our second volume, and after a year it was apparent that the gramophone fraternity was indeed a brotherhood. Although the paper was carrying a great deal of advertising and was clearly established, an editorial took some pride in its amateur flavour. It was a journal edited by and for enthusiasts. The actual machinery of gramophonery was still dominant and it was now that TuE GRAMOPHONE sponsored a public test of gramophones at the Steinway Hall, an extraordinary procedure come to think of it! Those attending were even invited to vote for the best, and it says much for the paper's absolute independence that the trade appeared to take all this in its stride. Record collectors have always been voluminous correspondents, so unlike the reticence of the player-piano world. Nevertheless, despite this silence, the PlayerPiano Supplement continued, and I am sure DC has been reading up the contemporary reviews of the wonderful rolls he has recently been presenting on the radio. Sir Compton Mackenzie contributed a revealing piece of autobiography devoted to his beginnings as a writer and the relationship of music thereto, and Herman Klein began his long association with the paper as opera critic. This amazing man was an established critic in 1878, and already by 1902 had perfected his Phono-Vocal-Method, a system of using records for voice training, inspired by a conversation with Lillian Nordica over luncheon. Many singers have been gramophone-taught, notably Miliza Korjus, a best seller on records who never seems to have appeared anywhere. There is a hilarious account of an episode on the HMV Stand at the Wembley Exhibition, which would horrify the audio fans of today. I quote: "When I entered the audition salon Mr. Rink and a lady assistant were working two of the largest machines in synchronism (sic) using good vigorous records for demonstration. Pretty indeed it was to watch Mr. Rink keeping his record accurately in step, even in Galli-Curci's most rapid trills, by braking it or speeding it up with his fingers". At one point, by request, three records of the same song sung by three different singers were played on three machines together. Mr. John Porte made a plea for recordings of literary works and bracketed Sybil Thorndyke with Frank Benson and Martin Harvey. Dame Sybil lived to take part in many such records and was one of the earliest of the great names of the theatre to record, and doubtless we may hope for much more from her. Reference to "good, vigorous records" is a reminder that in those days people chose specific records to play out of doors, and not only to set a romantic background for a pun t on the Cherwell. Among my own records from Lconcavallo's Zaza is a Vocalion with an anonymous recorded commentary on the back. It appears that these were spoken by Eric Foster, who, judging from this solitary example, did this beautifully. Christopher Stone, who revealed this information, was already using the pen-name "Peppering" and praising Phyllis Letts's Hills of Donegal, which he remembered with affection on that reminiscent HMV which I mentioned when writing about Plunket Greene. Reviews, over the ridiculous names of Newman Passage and Percy ditto, included two Beethoven Ninths, Fanny Heldy singing Butterfly in French, an Italian tenor singing Wagner in French, an Edison list with Rachmaninov playing the Second Hungarian Rhapsody (could this have been with the fabulous cadenza he wrote, almost as long as the work ?), the great Carl Flesch and Maggie Teyte singing Pale Hands I Loved (who was it who said that Amy Woodforde-Finden never got nearer the East than Liberty's ?). Mark Hambourg recorded what was presumably Liszt's Midsummer Night's Dream paraphrase, though the reviewer plainly knew nothing about this, and the redoubtable Dr. Weissmann conducted "Three Old Dances" by Mozart. Today these would all have been given their "K" numbers and be treated with the utmost respect. Among Notes and Queries somebody asks for "fairly cheap records of operatic numbers with a bit of 'go' in them", and there is a gale warning from the man who was to enliven the correspondence columns of the entire musical Press for a decade or more— Mr. Kaikhosra Sorabji. "In what conceivable sense are the execrable travesties, the hideous masses of inchoate filth, that are the majority of orchestral records, educational unless the hearers are goaded into smashing them into smithereens?". This anent a recording of Brigg Fair. Orchestral records continued to be made, and the paper came out in July.