There are two gems in this collection: the stunningly-transferred 1934 Scheherazade (you won’t believe how marvelous it sounds), and the similarly fine-sounding New World Symphony from the same year, which (to all intents and purposes) is making a first appearance on CD. Most if not all of the other stuff has been variously available in editions sounding at least as good, and at times a bit better. Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy and Prometheus, for example, can be had on Pearl in remasterings by Ward Marston, but in all fairness these are not very good performances to begin with, and they were miserably recorded in their day. The Carnival of the Animals appeared previously on Biddulph in a transfer slightly less boomy but every bit as clear and open on top as this one. Stokowski made a stunning stereo recording of Bizet’s L’Arlesienne music for Sony at the end of his life, frankly rendering this adequate but by no means special 1929 production irrelevant. Not everything that happened in Philadelphia was marvelous, after all.
Borodin’s Polovstian Dances sound marginally finer on Dutton, perhaps owing to cleaner source material, while the famous 1926 Nutcracker Suite makes a much more positive impression here than on Marston’s transfer for Pearl (though honors are evenly divided in the Bach Toccata and Fugue in D minor). Unfortunately, while the notes speak of the 1934 Philadelphia Strauss Death and Transfiguration, what we actually get is the 1941 All-American Youth Orchestra version, the worst of Stoki’s three recordings of the piece. The smaller items (Sibelius’ Valse Triste and Swan of Tuonela, Liszt’s second Hungarian Rhapsody, Tchaikovsky’s Solitude, and Shostakovich’s Prelude in E-flat minor) also sport fine transfers equal to or better than those previously available. On the whole, though, this seems rather a random sampling tossed together on the basis of available source material rather than a coherently planned collection focusing either on recordings unavailable elsewhere, or on some specific facet of Stokowski’s art and discography.
Packaging consists of a basic black book, with the discs contained in paper sleeves at the front and back–very awkward to remove and replace. The booklet layout also is not terribly sensible, with pretentious essays about Andante.com, its label, the transfer process, and some pretty undistinguished pencil-sketch composer portraits preceding the notes themselves, which are very good (though the biographical extracts on Stokowski taken from the Grove hardly seem necessary). A table of contents might have come in handy, and the infomercials really should have been placed after the serious musical essays. Similarly, there’s no work list on the outer covers, making individual pieces difficult to locate quickly (and surely this is essential information that purchasers in stores unable to open the sealed booklets will want to have).
I spend this much time on packaging and presentation issues because Andante.com clearly sees this as a “deluxe” product and is asking a deluxe price for it: around $80. I find the packaging concept neither particularly attractive nor especially practical in terms of user-friendliness, but Stokowski nuts at the very least will have to own this for the Dvorák and Rimsky-Korsakov items. However imperfectly executed as a “collector’s edition” (and we can assume that at least some of these problems will be corrected in future releases), you won’t believe how fine that Scheherazade sounds! If you decide to take the plunge, I for one certainly would understand. Incidentally, the back page of the booklet states: “20 copies of this limited edition have been numbered and retained by the label to be subsequently issued as part of a collectors [sic] series.” What a novel concept of “value”, given the fact that all of this material is in the public domain, is therefore free for the taking, and most of it already has been reissued in multiple editions on countless other labels. Are these folks for real? What’s next, a numbered edition of the Gideon Bible? Weird.
