Rose was the doyen
of American cellists. Readers may well
be aware of his solo stereo recordings
in the 1960s in which he re-recorded
some of the literature he’d earlier
set down in mono, and they may also
have caught the last recordings – I
think especially of the Brahms Cello
Sonatas disc recorded in 1982. But by
general consent Rose’s finest discographic
achievements as a soloist came in those
late 1940s to mid-1950s recordings of
which Biddulph gives us an apt selection,
complete with the inclusion of the hard
to find Swarthout sides, originally
released I believe on a 45rpm single.
If the Brahms Double
and Beethoven Triple Concertos gained
some of the widest exposure on disc
for him – alongside the later Stern-Rose-Istomin
trio records - he was very much at home
with a wide range of repertoire. A pupil
of the demanding, sarcastic Felix Salmond
at Curtis, Rose joined the NBC Symphony
led by Toscanini (for whom, in his writings,
he never hid his personal antipathy)
in 1938, moving to the Cleveland a year
later and then following the man who’d
appointed him, Rodzinski, back to New
York to lead the cellos of the Philharmonic.
He stayed eight years and then pursued
a solo career. That we should have much
more of Rose from the 1950s is doubtless
a reflection of economics and the ruthless
natural selection instincts of recording
companies who preferred the French school
– Tortelier, Navarra, Fournier – or
the emergent post War Russians. But
Rose was a player of the most admirable
musical instincts and accomplishment
and these early examples show him at
his considerable best.
The Saint-Saëns
is fluent and fluid though capable of
refined lyricism, reaching a peak in
the cantabile playing of the third movement,
where subtle changes in bow weight and
distribution illumine the playing with
a painterly eye. An interesting – though
incomplete – comparison can be made
with Rose’s slightly earlier self; a
fragment of a 1946 live recording with
anonymous forces has survived and is
on an invaluable Pearl double CD. As
indeed one can makes comparisons between
the 1952 Tchaikovsky and a piano accompanied
1947 Town Hall Concert (with Irving
Owen) where he is, not unsurprisingly,
quicker than with Szell, whose precise
chording, and whose witty and virtuosic
conducting are an equal pleasure. Bloch’s
Schelomo was a Feuerman speciality and
his 1940 Stokowski led recording was
a powerful achievement. Rose is more
ruminative and ostensibly serious than
Feuerman’s rapier incision and the former’s
expressive diminuendi are touching and
moving. Mitropoulos and the New York
Philharmonic mine quite a bit of colour
but the 1951 recording doesn’t catch
them in so richly focused sound, nor
is Rose’s tone as emphatically centred
as his great contemporary’s. The two
Swarthout items are certainly collector’s
items; I don’t know how long they stayed
in the catalogues but it can’t have
been long. Though she was only 49 she
sounds a mite matronly in the Massenet
but there’s rarity value in these two
items.
The transfers, which
I take to derive from commercial LP
and 45rpm discs haven’t entirely dealt
with some inherent problems. There’s
some LP rumble (in the Bloch) and some
steely, rather unattractive sound along
the way. The Saint-Saëns does also
sound rather cramped and constricted
acoustically. But Rose emerges unhindered
by such relative limitations. It’s good
to have these sides back in business.
Jonathan Woolf
Leonard Rose (cello) with