Sir Henry Wood conducts "Toccata & Fugue in D Minor"

[beaumonde]

Here is a new transfer of this beautiful pressing of Decca/Odeon-Parlophone 12" 78, from about 1935. Wood conducts his own transcription of the famous warhorse (probably not even by Bach at all, it turns out), attributed to "Klenovsky" (I'm not sure why).

Toccata & Fugue in D Minor
Sir Henry Wood/Queen’s Hall Orchestra
Decca 25551;TA 1781/1782; ca.1935

[clevelander]

I have to agree that this recording is remarkable for it's clarity and tone.
It may interest music lovers with an interest in history that the hall it was recorded in, The Queen's Hall, was said to have the most perfect accoustics in London. It was sadly bombed in 1941 and never rebuilt. It had been, for many years, the venue for the Promenade Concerts (conducted by Henry Wood)which had begun in the 1830s. These were moved to the Royal Albert Hall where they are still are held annually to this day. An absolutely superb building, but with vastly inferior accoustics to the Queen's Hall.

[yankmycrank]

Thank you for posting this, it's a wonderful record! I love Sir Henry's recordings.

[beaumonde]

Follow-up on "Klenovsky":

From: http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Bio/Wood-Henry.htm

"Among Henry Wood's popular arrangements were Chopin's Marche Funùbre, some works by J.S. Bach and the Trumpet Voluntary (mistaattributed to Purcell, but actually by Jeremiah Clarke). His orchestrations of other composers' works drew frequent criticisms, so when in 1929 he made an orchestral transcription of J.S. Bach's Toccata & Fugue in D minor, he presented it as a transcription by Paul Klenovsky. It was a great success. Only several years later did he confess to the little joke. The work was nonetheless published in 1934 as "Bach-Klenovsky, Organ Toccata and Fugue in D minor, for Orchestra (orchestrated by Sir Henry J. Wood)". He published The Gentle Art of Singing (4 volumes; 1927-1928) and About Conducting (London, 1945), and edited the Handbook of Miniature Orchestral and Chamber Music Scores (1937). He wrote an autobiography, My Life and Music (London, 1938)."

And from Wikipedia:

In 1929, Wood played a celebrated practical joke on musicologists and critics. "I got very fed up with them, always finding fault with any arrangement or orchestrations that I made ... 'spoiling the original' etc. etc.",[109] and so Wood passed off his own orchestration of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, as a transcription by a Russian composer called Paul Klenovsky.[n 13] In Wood's later account, the press and the BBC "fell into the trap and said the scoring was wonderful, Klenovsky had the real flare [sic] for true colour etc. – and performance after performance was given and asked for."[109] Wood kept the secret for five years before revealing the truth.[111] The press treated the deception as a great joke; The Times entered into the spirit of it with a jocular tribute to the lamented Klenovsky.[112][n 14]

13. ^ Cox (p. 102) states that there had been a real "Paul Klenovsky", a pupil of Glazunov who died young. Jacobs (p. 232) states that no such composer ever existed, although a Russian composer called Nicolai Klenovsky died in 1915. The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians supports the latter statement.[110]

[Lucius1958]

Pretty interesting, compared with Stokowski's better known transcription...

[FloridaClay]

Enjoyed it. And "war horse" or not, I still love the piece, my favorite rendition being by E. Power Biggs. Not sure if that one goes far enough back to have originally been on a 78.

Clay

[beaumonde]

Enjoyed it. And "war horse" or not, I still love the piece, my favorite rendition being by E. Power Biggs. Not sure if that one goes far enough back to have originally been on a 78.

Clay

Yes, it does (late '30s I think). I used to have my grandparent's set, back in the '70s, but it must have been disposed of decades ago. I still have tape transfers somewhere recorded at the time.

[Lenoirstreetguy]

I like Henry Wood a lot. Both he and Fritz Kreisler did a sort of " composer's revenge" on the critics. They both published their own work under the name of someone else and reaped paens of praise for it...until the critics found out.
This record is from Wood's mid-thirties Decca sojourn: he had always been one of English Columbia's brightest stars beginning in 1915. He went back to Columbia in 1938. I like his late acoustics a lot...and in some ways more than many of the electrical sides. He used a large dynamic palette in his conducting and it doesn't always work on record. This is surprising: one would think by the mid thirties the engineers would be able to handle it. In his memoirs ( 1938) the only recordings be mentions are the acoustics :
Incidentally I made some excellent recordings for Columbia during the War yeas [WW I] and whenever I put one on now it always recalls happy interludes in those trying times, and the jolly chats in the Studios with Arthur Brooks---then their manager.
It's interesting too that the label of this record gives credit to the orchestra leader --- the player we call the concert master on this side of the Atlantic. Wood always gave credit to his best orchestral players. We could take a page out of that book today.

Jim