I suspect that the
eyes of Sammons’s admirers will be sticking
out on stalks at the extraordinary compilation
of material enshrined in this CD and
DVD set. So diverse is it – and so astonishingly
rare – that I doubt anyone will have
encountered any of these recordings,
and few will even have entertained the
possibility of any of it having survived.
The recordings are
sometimes fragmentary, it’s true, and
in two cases there has been considerable
damage to the only surviving test pressings.
In the case of the off-air Elgar survival
some acetate deterioration has meant
a short patch from the commercial 1929
recording. The two Clarion cylinder
recordings are not, to my ear, quite
correctly pitched. But this is carping.
The earliest items
are indeed those Clarion cylinders and
they date from 1906. We know that he
recorded for the company in 1908 – he
made a single cylinder, of Mendelssohn
– but no one had previously made the
connection between "Alberti"
and Albert Sammons. But back in 1906
he was playing in theatre and pit orchestras
and had in fact been leader of the Tivoli
Theatre band at around the time in question.
The notes, by Gerald E. Cooperman, don’t
go into speculative detail as to why
he hid behind the single name but the
reason seems clear enough to me – fashion.
The Music Hall ditties – don’t forget
that Sammons had played in theatre bands
for Florrie Forde, Gus Elen and many
other greats – are dimly recorded but
one can still make out Sammons’s big
and expressive tone. These are the earliest
known recordings by him, pre-dating
that other Clarion and also the 1910
sides he made when leader of the Beecham
Symphony Orchestra
It was the discographer
Ronald Meyerstein who first made the
connection between some of the "Manuello"
sides and Sammons. I don’t wish to blow
my own trumpet but I identified a further
single side. "Manuello" was
a generic name for a mass of violin
discs – the Dutch player Boris Lensky
was the main artist - and the records
were issued on Regal, Columbia’s cheap
label and are amongst the "hidden"
Sammons records. There is no great difference
between these and his recordings issued
contemporaneously on Columbia – they
are prime examples and this Tchaikovsky
features his regular "Regal"
partner, the tragically short-lived
Ellen Tuckfield, who was carried off
by influenza in 1919.
There’s a famous photograph
of the khaki-clad violinist atop a tank
in London as he plays his fiddle to
soldiers below. Not inappropriately
we can hear him in a pot-pourri of the
National Anthems of the Allied Powers
- a bit of Vieuxtemps, a dash of Sarasate,
and what sounds very like two bars from
Ysaÿe’s Rêve d’enfant
which because of the Belgian’s great
admiration for Sammons, entirely reciprocated,
leads me to think the anonymous arrangement
is Sammons’s own.
Students and interested
parties have always been intrigued by
Sammons’s cadenzas – now we can hear
them played by the Master. They were
long out of print but are now available
on a special print via Boosey and Hawkes.
The Beethoven is entirely thought-through
and a superb alternative to more established
cadenzas; the Brahms is a sinewy piece
of masculine sensitivity teeming with
thematic interest and at one point distinctly
impressionist harmonies.
These are late acoustics
but we now come to a private early electric
that will drain all but the most sanguine
of their lifeblood. The foursome of
Sammons, William Primrose (then still
a violinist), Lionel Tertis, reigning
virtuoso of the viola, and Beatrice
Harrison essay Sammons’s own Cobbett
prize-winning Phantasy Quartet. Gerald
E. Cooperman misses opportunities galore
here in his error-strewn summary of
this piece. It was not influenced
by Arensky and any similarities with
Francophile models are surely unintended.
It was not published by Farquar,
it was published by Hawkes (his regular
publishers) and it was not recorded
by Vocalion in 1922. Waldo Warner’s
Phantasy Quartet was recorded
by Vocalion in 1922 – Warner was the
viola in the London String Quartet of
which Sammons was for nine years the
first violin – but Cooperman’s litany
of mistakes is simply unforgivable.
The tonal breadth of
the foursome is staggering, with Tertis
pouring forth golden tone and Sammons
reaching oratorical heights of brilliance.
Primrose too shows why many considered
him Sammons’s natural heir and Harrison
is not at all the salon player so rudely
caricatured by such as Stravinsky and
Hindemith. The only limitation is the
sound quality of an ad-hoc studio run-through
(Columbia’s Clerkenwell Road I should
think – though against that speculation
it should be noted that Harrison was
contracted to HMV, Primrose flitted
between HMV and Columbia and Sammons
and Tertis were by now Columbia men.)
One of those present
at Lionel Tertis’s (as it happened)
premature Retirement dinner in 1937
was the strangely named Guirne Creith.
She sat at Sammons’s table. He’d performed
her Concerto with the BBC Orchestra
and Constant Lambert conducting and
together she and Sammons had performed
her Sonata at Wigmore Hall, Aeolian
Hall and for the BBC. The BBC transcription
was not retained by the corporation
but comes from a private collector.
The work is a pungent and entertaining
one – a compound of Roussel, Respighi,
a touch of cyclical Franck, neo-classicism
in the All’antiche third movement,
hints of Goossens’s No.1 and Finzi’s
Introit and strong affiliations
with Milhaud in the finale, where Sammons
"plays the Blues" superbly
(what a pity he never recorded the Ravel).
This has fair claims to be considered
one of the most entertaining British
Sonatas of the 1930s – and really first
class recording quality as well.
In the concert diary
he kept Sammons marked important dates
in capitals. Such were his collaborations
with Mengelberg and Monteux, Beecham
and Malko (Szymanowski and Delius in
the same programme). One other outstanding
collaboration was an unlikely sounding
one – the touring Vienna Symphony (not
Philharmonic) under its conductor Weingartner
in the Elgar Concerto in Nottingham,
of all places. The pioneer home recordist
G. Dudley Twose (later made C.B.E for
his work in radio wave conductivity
research) managed to preserve the slow
movement when the concert was broadcast
by the BBC’s Birmingham transmitter,
though not alas the remainder (hear
his many other amazing recordings at
the National Sound Archive). I judge
this movement the superior of the 1929
New Queen’s Hall/Wood commercial recording.
For one thing Sammons’s tone takes on
an almost spine-chilling grandeur that
even eclipses the commercial disc (something
one also notices in the live 1944 Delius
Concerto preserved at the National Sound
Archive) and Weingartner manages to
imbue the strings with a profoundly
"European" gravity and sensibility,
something that aligns the concerto with
the continental far more than any other
performance I have ever heard. The small
"patch" noted above is utterly
insignificant and very brief.
As if this were not
enough we have a brief but invaluable
DVD bonus; I say brief but it’s of immense
interest to those who like to see their
musicians as well as hear them. Sammons
served on the jury of the 1951 Carl
Flesch International Violin Competition
and he is seen in a short Pathé
newsreel chatting to some other luminaries
– Max Rostal, in bow tie and carrying
a briefcase (!), Sir Adrian Boult, armed
with a glass of milk, and a man whom
I believe to be (but is not captioned)
Sascha Lasserson, famous Russian violin
pedagogue, an Auer pupil, and long resident
in London. In "A Violin Lesson"
we see Sammons guiding the young Hugh
Bean through the thickets of the Bloch
Concerto – which Sammons played, once,
in 1942. At one point we see him take
his own Gofriller and execute a perfect
passage, which he follows with a characteristically
humorous aside – "Not bad for an
old ’un!" The brief 1944 clip shows
him outside Buckingham Palace where
his wife, the formidable Olive Hobday
(daughter of Alfred and Ethel, two great
musicians, the latter a friend of Brahms),
is seen relieving him of the C.B.E ribbon
and squeezing his hands into a pair
of leather gloves.
Fortunately companies
such as Naxos, Pearl and Dutton have
all been restoring a number of Sammons’s
recordings to the living catalogues.
All violin aficionados however will
need this quite extraordinary Cremona
disc – an archaeological horde of the
most stunning, unexpected and brilliantly
accomplished kind.
Jonathan Woolf
CREMONA PRODUCTIONS 0013 [CD 59.35
+ DVD 7.48]
