Deity is in this Place! Numen Inest!

 I'm listening to more of The Juilliard String Quartet's 15 CD set The Early Columbia Recordings 1949-56.

Darius Milhaud: Cantate de L'Enfant et de la Mère; The Household Muse

This was one of the first albums from the Juilliard String Quartet recorded by Columbia; it was released in June of 1950. It contains two works by Darius Milhaud with a special authenticity: the Cantate de L'Enfant et de la Mère is narrated by Madeleine Milhaud, Darius's wife, and conducted by the composer. The Household Muse for solo piano was played by Milhaud himself.

I'm trying to put myself in the position of someone listening to this LP at his or her grammophone back in 1950. This was contemporary music in the sense that Milhaud was still alive; the Cantata was written in 1938, while the piano work was only five years old. And it might have sounded "modern" to some ears, though Milhaud's most challenging modernist phase was well in the past by then. I wonder if it would have seemed fresh and new in 1950, or merely old-fashioned and a bit sentimental. I love this music so much, but it's hardly leading edge. The performers sell this in just the right way: sentimental, but not mawkish, homespun but with the numinous power of the household gods of ancient Rome:

"A religion of usages and sentiment rather than of facts and belief, and attached to very definite things and places—the oak of immemorial age, the rock on the heath fashioned by weather as if by some dim human art, the shadowy grove of ilex, passing into which one exclaimed involuntarily, in consecrated phrase, Deity is in this Place! Numen Inest!—it was in natural harmony with the temper of a quiet people amid the spectacle of rural life, like that simpler faith between man and man, which Tibullus expressly connects with the period when, with an inexpensive worship, the old wooden gods had been still pressed for room in their homely little shrines."

- Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean

I guess I have something of the same feeling myself when it comes to this music. The Deity is in the LP itself, somehow. The record album is a "homely little shrine", even more a fetish object today than it was 70 years ago. That's why I'm not listening to this Juilliard String Quartet set streamed on Spotify, but on these CDs stamped with the sacred marks of the Long-Playing Record of 1950.

Speaking of sacred marks, the beautiful album cover design isn't credited, but I'm fairly confident that it's by Darrill Connelly. He did the covers for the three Bartok albums that were released immediately after this record. 

 

 

Bartok String Quartets in a masterful recording

Dennis Stock's photograph of the Juilliard String Quartet;
undated, but it looks to be from the mid-50s

I'm listening to more of The Juilliard String Quartet's 15 CD set The Early Columbia Recordings 1949-56. What a marvellous project this is!

In two New York concerts, on February 28 and March 28, 1949, the Juilliard Quartet performed the six string quartets of Béla Bartók, to enthusiastic audiences. This was less than a year after Columbia Records unveiled the Long Playing record - the LP - at a press conference in the Waldorf Astoria on June 21, 1948. Soon thereafter, the ensemble was in the 30th Street Studio recording all six of these wonderful works, producing fine records but also setting the stage for the many comprehensive sets of the LP era. To market the three individual discs as a set, the three LPs shared a single, excellent but uncredited liner note essay, and three wonderful album cover designs by Darrill Connelly. And all three LPs (three double 78rpm albums as well) were released the same day: August 14, 1950.

Though Olin Downes gave a very positive review in the New York Times of those first two concerts, already by 1952 the Times reviewer R.P. wondered, in a review of a second Juilliard Bartok cycle concert series, whether "the playing could have been a trifle over-refined." 

The precision of ensemble was wonderfully exact. the balance of tone and the blending of timbres was exemplary, and there was fine integration in the approach of the four men. But for one listener the note of human passion sounded a little thin.

This criticism will, I'm sure, come up many times before we finish all 15 of these CDs. I would normally be a bit skeptical of this, but in the Bartok case I think it's at least partly apropos. In their second recording from 1998, the Takács Quartet, which I know the best in these works, doubles down on the "human passion", emphasizing Bartok's folkloric sources. The Juilliard, by contrast, focus more on Bartok's hard, streamlined modernism. Both are obviously contained within the score; this is a matter of emphasis only. These are still excellent versions, and remarkable for both interpretation and recorded sound, not just for 1950, but today.

Legendary recordings from a great String Quartet

Juilliard String Quartet: The Early Columbia Recordings, 1949-56

The 1950s were a great time for classical music recordings; so many special recordings were made in Columbia's 30th Street Studio in New York. This marvellous set of 15 CDs from Sony Classical brings it all back: the wonderful abstract designs - many by Fred Houseman - and the great, detailed liner notes. It's all here, if shrunk down a lot, right down to the CD itself looking just like a 12" LP.

I was excited when I opened the box, and I decided right away that I would review each of the 15 discs separately, one every few days. So get ready for a wonderful trip back to the 50s, to hear some wonderful music, beautifully played.

__________

The first CD I played from the set was their Mozart disc, recorded in April & May of 1953. 

At that point the group had been together for seven years, and these two quartets show the cohesion of four musicians who were well aware of each other's abilities and quirks. As well, the Juilliard Quartet were obviously at home in Columbia's 30th Street Studio by this time; there's a real intimacy in these beautifully-recorded pieces. One can imagine one is eavesdropping on the original String Quartet Supergroup that first played these works: Mozart himself playing viola, with Johann Christian Bach, Joseph Haydn and Johann Georg Hoffmeister. The pitfalls of too careful synchronization are avoided; each of the Juilliard musicians - Robert Mann and Robert Koff playing violin, Raphael Hillyer on viola and Arthur Winograd on cello - plays as an individual, with their own personality shining through. Winograd shines in the Quartet no. 21, K. 575, one of the works Mozart wrote to curry favour with the cello-playing King of Prussia, Frederic Wilhelm II.

I love the Fred Houseman design from the original LP cover. And the liner notes by Charles Burr are detailed and informative. It's odd, though, how Burr keeps pointing out how American the group is. He even quotes the critic Thomas Archer, writing in the Montreal Gazette, saying "from which vantage point he can be assumed to write with disinterest." I'm not sure whose shoulder this particular chip is on: Burr's or Columbia's. I can't imagine that the four musicians are out to prove anything; they're just making great music. "We can play Mozart just as well as any dumb European Quartet!" Doesn't sound likely to me. Nearly 70 years later, it all seems a bit silly. We've known for a long time that this was a world-class group. The music sounds fabulous; this is Mozart playing that I adore.

Here is the slow movement of the K. 575 Quartet by Mozart, as played by the Juilliard String Quartet: