SOLD: Rare Henry Wood Tchaikovsky set with album! $100

[52089]

Complete, 1923 set of 4 discs of Tchaikovsky's Pathetique Symphony (No. 6). Sir Henry Wood conducts the New Queen's Hall Orchestra. These are on Columbia gold flag label discs, which are in good condition. A major plus is that the original album is included, albeit in less than wonderful shape with torn pages and loose binding. Still, when was the last time you saw one of these?

Previous discussion of this set here:
http://forum.talkingmachine.info/viewto ... sky#p71676

I'd like $100 plus shipping for this but will consider offers. Shipping is extra, but I can offer free delivery to Wayne or anywhere my usual route between Boston and Wayne/Long Island.

PM to reserve, offer, or ask questions.

[Menophanes]

This set is of great historical importance, since Henry Wood was particularly noted in the 1890s for his understanding of Russian music and was largely responsible for the popularity of Tchaikovsky in Britain. (He is now best remembered as co-founder and for more than forty-five years sole conductor of the Queen's Hall Promenade Concerts, an annual series which continues to this day under the auspices of the B.B.C.) I believe he never recorded this work again. Unfortunately the set does not make easy listening; the work is heavily cut and Wood often adopts unnatural tempi in order to avoid cutting the music still further, so that (for example) the ending of the first movement, with its famous descending pizzicato scales, is taken at a quick march!

As 52089 implies, acoustic orchestral or instrumental sets in their original albums are not easy to find. After fifty years' pursuit of such things, I have only ever seen three: Weingartner's Beethoven VII (likewise Columbia), Albert Coates's Beethoven IX (H.M.V. – both from 1923) and this set itself, in a British light-blue-label pressing. I should imagine that American versions are even more scarce.

Oliver Mundy.

[drh]

...As 52089 implies, acoustic orchestral or instrumental sets in their original albums are not easy to find. After fifty years' pursuit of such things, I have only ever seen three: Weingartner's Beethoven VII (likewise Columbia), Albert Coates's Beethoven IX (H.M.V. – both from 1923) and this set itself, in a British light-blue-label pressing. I should imagine that American versions are even more scarce.

Oliver Mundy.

For the, uh, record, I have the English Columbia issue to which you refer, albeit in a repurposed later album; the numbers are L.1489-1492.

[yankmycrank]

English Columbia also took considerable heat for the rather significant abridgements, which were commonplace in classical orchestral recordings a few years earlier, but frowned upon by the mid-1920s. The Petty France studio was particularly effective for acoustic orchestral recordings; a few years ago a fellow from Boston figured out to how recover bass in acoustic orchestra discs (provided the base was there in the orchestration), and told me that he got some of his best results from Petty France Columbias.