Reviving Mercury’s ‘Living Presence’

For nearly 20 years, beginning in 1951, the old Mercury label, which disappeared well before the advent of compact disc, produced a series of recordings that to many audiophile ears represented technical perfection.

Mercury’s control-room team was headed by recording director Wilma Cozart, musical supervisor Harold Lawrence and the engineer who devised the “Living Presence” technique, the late C. Robert Fine.

Among the artists involved were the Minneapolis Symphony, as the Minnesota Orchestra was then called, under music director Antal Dorati and his successor, Stansilaw Skrowaczewski; the Detroit Symphony under its chef , Paul Paray; and the Eastman-Rochester Symphony with conductor-composer Howard Hanson. Dorati also recorded with the London Symphony and, after the Hungarian uprising of 1956, the newly formed Philharmonia Hungarica.

Now Philips, which inherited the Mercury catalogue some years back and subsequently allowed it to languish, has reissued, at midprice, highlights of the “Living Presence” series, with eight CDs thus far received for review. Happily, Philips has not tinkered with the sound of the originals.

The sonic aim of these recordings was to put the home listener into the midst of the orchestra rather than hearing it with the usual distant, concert-hall aural perspective. Multiple-miking, with its infinite possibilities for “regulating” the sound of individual instruments, was sternly ruled out.

What emerges--whatever the repertory, whoever the performers--is close-up, stunningly clear in a darkish way, and just resonant enough to avoid boxiness. In its raw immediacy it’s as much a fantasy sound as today’s glassy slick digitality, to which “Living Presence” might seem a pointed reaction if it had just been developed.

The performances are above all scrupulous, the sonics both hefty and clarifyingly invasive--advantages in a program of monuments of the Second Viennese School from Dorati and the London Symphony (432 006) in top form: Schoenberg’s Five Pieces, Opus 16; Webern’s Five Pieces, Opus 10; Berg’s Three Pieces, Opus 6, and his “Lulu” Suite. The harsh soprano of Helga Pilarczyk, however, fails to project Lulu’s “irresistible seductiveness” in her two numbers.

Dorati/Minneapolis/Philharmonia Hungarica are protagonists in a Kodaly-Bartok program that includes the former’s “Hary Janos” Suite and “Marrosszek” and “Galanta” Dances, the latter’s Hungarian Sketches and Roumanian Dances (432 005). All are zestfully, idiomatically done, although one might debate whether in “Hary” the listener really needs the cymbalom implanted in his skull.

Dorati and his Minneapolis and London orchestras seem less happy with their Respighi program: the “Fountains of Rome” and their accompanying “Pines” as well as the elegant “The Birds” and the less familiar, less clever “Brazilian Impressions” (432 007). Better executed, livelier CD versions of all are available.

Byron Janis, however, raises body temperature with his joyously flashy readings of both Liszt Piano Concertos (and some solo pieces) for which Mercury moved equipment and staff to Moscow in 1962--the first such U.S.-Soviet joint venture--and wisely engaged conductors Kiril Kondrashin and Gennadi Rozhdestvensky to keep the soloist from running off the rails (432 002).

The Skrowaczewski-Minneapolis pairing of the two composer-devised suites from Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet” is appealing as well. Not much balletic grace here, rather propulsiveness and and some stunning solo wind playing (432 004).

It’s nice, too, to renew acquaintances with Janos Starker’s cool, cultivated interpretations of Dvorak’s Cello Concerto, Tchaikovsky’s “Rococo” Variations and Bruch’s “Kol Nidrei,” all with Dorati and the LSO (432 001).

But no obvious purpose is served by the blunt, even brutal Paray/Detroit Symphony readings of standards by Ravel and Ibert (432 003).

And, while a few years back we might have welcomed Hanson’s own recordings of his First (“Nordic”) and Second (“Romantic”) Symphonies (432 008) with the Eastman-Rochester orchestra, they sound more rough-hewn and sonically cramped than necessary today beside the polished and dramatic readings of Gerard Schwarz and the Seattle Symphony, sumptuously recorded on the Delos label.