Red Welte rolls and artists
By Rob Deland
I too am very interested in Red Welte classical rolls. It's amazing to me when looking through the Smith-Howe Welte catalog how many students of Liszt and Leschetizky (in addition to Leschetizky himself) recorded Red rolls, and how many of these have never been available on the licensee format. People like Raoul Pugno, Eugen d'Albert, Moriz Rosenthal, Emil von Sauer, Alfred Reisenauer, Arthur de Greef, Bernhard Stavenhagen, Frederic Lamond, Josef Weiss, Arthur Friedheim, Jose Vianna da Motta, Mark Hambourg, Ossip Gabrilowitsch, and Josef Slivinski all made rolls, mostly on Welte only, and most on red or green rolls only! Many of these made early phonograph recordings, but a few left no other record of their playing than the few Welte rolls they recorded. Most of these interesting Welte rolls were recorded around 1905.
I found an interesting 2-CD set on the Pearl label entitled "The Pupils of Liszt". It contains phonograph recordings by Arthur de Greef, Josef Weiss, Frederic Lamond, Moriz Rosenthal, Jose Vianna da Motta, Arthur Friedheim, Emil von Sauer, Eugen d'Albert, and a couple of others. These recordings were made between 1912 and 1941; both CD's are over 70 minutes long, and the liner notes are very good. I haven't taken the time to see how many of the performances here were issued on rolls, but it would be interesting to listen to both back-to-back.
I'm reading a book on the history of pianists from Mozart to present which mentions many of these artists ("The Great Pianists" by Harold Schonberg; this is pretty easy to find in good book stores). Schonberg mentions reproducing rolls several times in passing (basically saying that they're unreliable as a true record of the artist's style). While it's hard to argue with this opinion in general, I have a hard time writing reproducing rolls off altogether; certainly there are some rolls which are quite convincing as actual performances, and others which are more obviously influenced by editors. This is the case across the board, with all roll types & manufacturers - in my opinion.
Several sets of red & green Welte rolls have been converted to the licensee format by the Tonnesens, and by John McClelland. I have recently come across a collection of red Welte rolls in the Chicago area. Of the 150+ red rolls in my friend's collection, I figured that 44 were never issued on the licensee format. I plan to convert a number of these to the licensee format for issue as recuts, probably sometime next year. This is a new direction for me, but a very interesting one that I'm anxious to persue. I have yet to chase down some of the other red Welte collectors in the U.S. to see if others are interested in loaning rolls for duplication, but I hope to see more of this activity in the future, by myself and others. There are dozens of performances by the artists listed above and others which have yet to be heard by most collectors today, and I look forward to hearing them myself, and to helping make some of them available through recuts. As Robin Pratt has said on numerous occasions, it is up to us to keep this hobby alive! I hope we will see a renewed interest in Welte now that Charles Smith and Dick Howe have finally made the incredible Welte catalog available to us. We'll see...
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(Message sent Tue 11 Jul 1995, 14:19:51 GMT, from time zone GMT-0800.) |
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