ITG 2006 - Gabrieli Presentation

Neville Young, reporter

When all my school friends were writing “Pink Floyd” and “Hawkwind” on their rucksacks I was obsessed with a brass recording - an LP (look it up, young people) that I took out from my city library so many times that I must have pretty nearly worn it out. This was a fabulous, almost legendary album, The Antiphonal Music of Gabrieli - I can still remember the thrill of its cover announcing: “Together for the First Time! The Virtuoso Brass of Three Great Orchestras” and the fascination of that chart on the back cover showing, with colored boxes, the location of each player for each piece in the then new-fangled stereo image. (My local record dealer must have got very sick of hearing me ask if CBS 72729 was in yet, but the good news is that you can buy it on CD right now.)

This morning Carole Nowicke and John Almeida updated and illuminated the story of this recording in the most intriguing way. A casual meeting last year had led to this project which aims to thoroughly document the recording while the materials and memories are still available. The presenters have collected an incredible archive of photos, reviews, video clips and stories, and have interviewed many of the people who played on those sessions back in 1968. This morning they were brilliantly assisted, almost to the point of show-stealing, by trombonist Tyrone Breuninger and tuba player Abe Torchinsky, who as members of the Philadelphia Orchestra played on the LP and who were here to share their memories and answer questions. Nowicke and Almeida's presentation - which I suspect represents only a fraction of the material they have amassed - gave us great insight about the recording session, and the musical and historical context, including material from interviews with the players and further illuminated by the live input from Breuninger and Torchinsky. Listening to the recording you would not dream, for example, that most of the tracks are the first take; that there was no editing; that they hadn't formally tuned (Torchinsky quips: the horns were tuned at the factory, why change them?); and that, most incredibly, there was real concern that the noise from a rock band practicing downstairs in the same building, at floor-vibrating volumes, would get onto the recorded tracks.

Given the great love for this disk which was evident in the audience it was particularly amusing to see some of the less positive reviews from the time: “It is hard to enthuse over a non-stop succession of thirteen pieces rendered on the monochrome medium of modern brass” was a particular favorite of mine. It was also very interesting, even moving, to hear other people's tributes to the recording - for example the comment from Warren Deck of the New York Philharmonic got a frisson of agreement when we read: “After all of these years, it is still the standard by which I judge all the other Gabrieli records.” Another rather good moment was when the presenters played us a recording of an academically sensitive, authentically validated, four-viol performance of one of the works. Naturally as a well-educated and historically concerned audience we listened very carefully to several seconds of this before wanting the 1968 version back on!

Almeida and Nowicke were at pains to point out that this presentation is a work in progress and that this was its first public outing: to this I can only respond, what a great start. They're thinking about how to make the final version into a published work, perhaps assembling it into a CD or DVD - if this happens I will be first in line for my copy. Till then I will carry with me the happy memory of a truly intriguing talk and the wonderful contribution from Torchinsky and Breuninger. As soon as I get home I am putting the CD on again for another reminder of just how great this album is.