Download: Catterall String Quartet in Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikovsky (HMV, 1921-24)
harpsichordian
This is to be my final offering for a while of acoustically recorded
major works, and it's a large one: it comprises all three issued
complete string quartet recordings by the Catterall String Quartet
(Arthur Catterall and John S. Bridge, violins; Frank S. Park, viola;
Johan C. Hock, cello), plus the filler for one of those sets. The
major works are the first two Beethoven quartets (Op. 18, Nos. 1 and
2) and the first Brahms quartet (Op. 51, No. 1), and the filler is the
Scherzo from Tchaikovsky's Quartet No. 2 in F, Op. 22. The group also
subsequently recorded a third Beethoven quartet, presumably complete,
on nine sides - No. 13 in B-Flat, Op. 130 (a work otherwise unrecorded
acoustically), but this, alas, was unissued.
The Brahms quartet has the distinction of being the first complete
string quartet available to the British record buyer, as proclaimed in
the February 1924 issue of "The Gramophone" (JPEGs of the review,
spreading over two pages, are included in the ZIP file). Recorded on
June 18 and 19, 1923, and issued on HMV D 791 through 794, it actually
is not, as the review claims, the first complete string quartet
recording ever made (that honor goes to the Busch Quartet's 1922
Polydor recording of the Quartet in F, Op. 3, No. 5, attributed then
to Haydn but now thought to be by Roman Hofstetter), nor is it even
the earliest of these recordings. The Beethoven Op. 18, No. 1 was
initially planned as an abridged recording, one movement per side as
was still the custom when the earliest sessions for this work took
place on May 8 and 9, 1922; fortunately, this plan was scrapped and
only the Scherzo from those sessions was actually used, being complete
on one side. The other three movements were then re-recorded
complete, each on two sides, on April 30 and June 18, 1923. The work
now took seven sides, so the Tchaikovsky Scherzo (recorded on November
14, 1921), which had been originally released on D 597 (coupled with a
Schumann quartet movement), was re-released as the final side of the
Beethoven set; the whole package appeared rather belatedly as HMV D
947 through 950. The recording of the Beethoven Op. 18, No. 2 was
begun on the heels of the Brahms, June 19, 1923 (first movement),
completed May 6, 1924 (remainder), and issued as D 997 through 999.
The Catterall Quartet's recording career for HMV effectively ended
when the Virtuoso Quartet was formed by the Gramophone Company in
1924. The Catterall Quartet moved to Columbia after the introduction
of electrical recording, but their repertoire there consisted mainly
of potboilers, the only Beethoven being the slow movement of Op. 18,
No. 5 (the only Beethoven quartet that Columbia's "star" ensemble of
the period, the Lener Quartet, didn't record until the 1930s).
I've included a text file with a chronological listing, with matrix
information, of all the Catterall Quartet's recordings of which I'm
aware, for HMV in 1921-24 and Columbia in 1926-27. The former are
culled from Alan Kelly's Bb/Cc matrix listing, the latter from Ronald
Taylor's discography of 12" UK Columbia issues. I've also added JPEGs
of several of the record labels, the Brahms showing a Victor sticker
for importation into the USA. All these files, 13 MP3s, 6 JPEGs and
the text file are crammed into one rather large ZIP file.
http://www.mediafire.com/?dszllhlnv01
Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Bryan Bishop