Deep red RCA Victor Red Seal Record labels.
Printed in U.S.A.
Autocoupled (drop automatic): Sides are 1/12 2/11 3/10 4/9 5/8 6/7
Recorded November 22, 1944 at Symphony Hall, Boston.
Side 2 was recut and has noticeable wow.
Notes on the recording of SYMPHONY NO. 5:
Anyone who is lucky enough to have heard the BSO play in its home, Symphony Hall, Boston, knows not only the sound of a great orchestra, but also the unique glory of the acoustics of that auditorium. Built in 1900, Symphony Hall was one of the first concert halls built utilizing the then new science of acoustics. Harvard University professor, Wallace C. Sabine served as the acoustical consultant, and for nearly a century audiences have thrilled to his stunning success. However, recording engineers do not always have the luxury of capturing this beautiful sound. For broadcasts of live concerts, the more hall reverberation that is picked up, the more audience noise there will be. For this reason, engineers favor placing directional microphones up close to the orchestra. In Dr. Koussevitzky's day, monaural recordings did not lend themselves to hall ambience as readily as do modern stereophonic ones. Also, a feeling existed then that hall reverberation tended to muddy recorded sound. With all of the distortion and record surface noise they already had to contend with, this is understandable. The first recordings made in Symphony Hall in the late 1920s, for the Victor Talking Machine Co. by Western Electric Company contain some hall reverberation. After NBC (2) joined with the Victor Talking Machine Company in 1930, and started making records, it favored a non-reverberant sound, probably utilizing directional microphones placed up close to the orchestra. After World War II, NBC once again tried to capture the sound of the hall.
Victor's famous classical Artist and Repertoire Representative from 1930 to 1944, Charles O'Connell, had resigned his post with the company only a few months prior to the making of this recording of Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony. O'Connell seems to have been a very talented man, who possessed not only the technical knowledge and skills to supervise a recording crew, but was also an accomplished organist, conductor, and author. Among his credits in the latter area were The Victor Book of the Opera, and The Other Side of the Record. As a recording engineer, he worked closely with Albert Pulley, about whom little is known other than he had a very fine reputation as an engineer. One of the most obvious characteristics of the recordings O'Connell supervised was their relative lack of hall ambience. O'Connell no doubt realized that he could not capture ambience with sufficient clarity to justify it. With all of the surface noise and distortion present on the average 78 rpm disc, ambience took on a muddy quality; thus it became more of a liability than an asset.
Macklin Marrow followed Charles O'Connell as Victor's classical "A&R Rep." He supervised all of the recording sessions in Symphony Hall from this November 1944 recording through the recording sessions of April 1946. The initials "AP," for Albert Pulley, continue to appear on Marrow's logs, as they did on O'Connell's. The most noticeable change in the character of the sound that Marrow recorded, compared to O'Connell's, was due to microphone placement. For the sake of sonic clarity, O'Connell had favored miking the orchestra up close. Marrow went to the opposite extreme, attempting to capture more of the acoustics and sound of Symphony Hall in his recordings. He may have made used non-directional microphones, in order to pick up hall ambience, and he very likely placed them back aways from the orchestra. It would also seem probable that Marrow favored opening the rehearsal curtain more than O'Connell. The rehearsal curtain is a heavy drape that hangs across the auditorium at about the eighth row of seats away from the stage. Its serves to damp the excessive echo in the hall during rehearsals. The audience absorbs a very material amount of sound. The curtain also has a secondary function, which is to allow the orchestra to heat only the stage area during rehearsals in the wintertime.
During the Koussevitzky years, Victor recorded the orchestra in their places on the stage. To absorb the unwanted reverberation from the empty hall, they simply
pulled the rehearsal curtain closed part way, leaving it open just enough on the sides to allow for some ambience. Not long after Dr. Koussevitzky retired, Victor changed its Symphony Hall recording plan. The new system called for the removal of seats allowing the musicians to play down on the floor. Interestingly, in the 1970s, the commercial recording companies moved the musicians back onto the stage and some of them returned to regulating the hall ambience with the rehearsal curtain as they had during the Koussevitzky years. Some engineers also drape the balconies and other parts of the hall with sound absorbent material, in addition to making use of the rehearsal curtain. Marrow achieved only a mixed success. Some of the recordings he made in this fashion, such as the present Tchaikovsky Fifth Symphony and Beethoven's Fifth Symphony recorded on the following day, proved fairly good. Others, like that of Rachmaninoff's Isle of the Dead (April 23, 1945) sound muddy. At their best, the BSO glows in Symphony Hall's glorious acoustics. At their worst, the sound of the orchestra is practically lost in an indistinct roar. For years, it was thought that certain of these records were recuts, but now archival information sources make it possible to distinguish distortion resulting from recutting, and distortion caused by Marrow's poor miking.
Actually, only side 2 of the 78 rpm version of this Tchaikovsky Fifth Symphony was recut. Record matrix -1 of this side was rejected for reasons not stated. Record matrix -IA was rejected for ''wheel marks." The recut finally issued was a bad one, with wow or unstable pitch. Fortunately, this was not transferred onto the 45 rpm version of this recording, or onto RCA's 1966 reissue of it. However, it was transferred to the first incarnation on LP, LM-1047. In fact, a keen ear will decipher slightly unstable pitch on all versions of this recording except the 45 rpm set, WDM-1057. The wartime shortage of metal for recording lathe replacement parts explains an occasional wobble in the pitch of some recordings made at this time. Conversations with persons working in this field during World War II indicate that during much of the war period defective lathes were used. With completely stable pitch, the 45s must have been dubbed from a source other than the 78 rpm parts, the "safety lacquers," and not the 78 rpm metal parts. Safety lacquers were 16-inch acetate discs recorded at 33 1/3 rpm made simultaneously with the 78s. If all the 78 rpm parts for a given side were lost in manufacturing, as sometimes happened, engineers could fall back on the 16-inch acetate transcriptions as a source from which to recut new 78 rpm parts. Apparently, on occasion, the safety lacquers also served as the source for reissues, such as with the 45 rpm set of this Tchaikovsky Fifth Symphony.
A postscript to this background information on Koussevitzky's Tchaikovsky Fifth recording is the following handwritten note that appears in the log margin, "Tom McCusker says this was bestseller Sym. by Boston Sym. 0. 80,000 thru Ju. 1950."
- Edward D. Young: SERGE KOUSSEVITZKY. A COMPLETE DISCOGRAPHY, PART I.
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