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There is another early (acoustic) version by the Goossens Orchestra, conducted by Eugene Goossens III, on the Edison-Bell Velvet Face label. This is complete on two sides; the recording is rather murky (even for the time) and one is very conscious of the fact that seven or eight violinists at most are trying to do the work of twenty-four or more; but the xylophone* comes out quite well, as do the violin and oboe solos, the latter played by the conductor's brother Leon.Inigo wrote:Argh! Danse Macabre is one of my favourite records. I own the two Stoky/Philadelphia versions, plus a Brunswick one by Cleveland Orch conducted by Solokov, abridged to fit one 12" side. In later times I acquired an acoustic version on Odeon by the Paris Opera orch, squeezed in one 11" side, matrix XP-5039, reported to have been recorded in 1910, as per marvelous matrix compilation made by Christian Zwarg, from GHT . . .
Would 'When the night wind howls' from Sullivan's Ruddigore qualify for this thread? (Gilbert's text ends 'Oh, then is the spectres' holiday,/ Then is the ghosts' high noon', and Sullivan's setting is so rich in macabre atmospherics that some early listeners, including Gilbert himself, found them excessive.) The first complete or nearly complete recording dates from 1919, but there may be earlier versions of this number.
Oliver Mundy.
*No instrument, I think, has changed more in the last hundred years than the xylophone. At the beginning of that period the bars were actually made of wood (as the Greek name, 'wood-voice', implies) and were arranged transversely in four overlapping rows so that anyone playing a simple scale passage had to skip constantly from one row to another. All the xylophone solos which abounded on two-minute cylinders would have been played on instruments of this type.
