A brief reminder that these are recordings of performances at the Vienna State Opera, made with primitive equipment and under difficult conditions by the house engineer, Hermann May: an interesting feature of the present issue being that one of the sequences here is something else. The bartered bride, on this occasion, was given not at the Opera but in the Musikvereinsaal, and the recording has a complicated provenance. The listener wonders what has happened: acoustically, we have come from the dark ages through into modern times. The explanation is that the performance was recorded on one of the first tape machines used for broadcast on German Radio. At the end of the war, the whole Radio archive was purloined by the Russians, who a few years ago kindly returned it. Since then some of these recordings have been painstakingly worked on, with strikingly good results. Equally startling is the first sound of the tenor's voice. This is the young Anton Dermota, well established with the company since 1936 and singing with the full glory of a fine voice in its prime: he provides (all too briefly) one of the most enjoyable experiences in the Vienna series so far. Esther Rethy, the Majenka (or Marie), by then appears to have been singing with a somewhat shallow tone, none too steady and with audible wear on the top notes, but two unexpectedly beautiful voices are heard in the Sextet; the names rang no bells with me, but they are Olga Levko-Antosch and Elena Nicolaida.
As with the previous volumes, one of the strongest impressions is made by a singer who previously had been little more than a name, the Bulgarian tenor Todor Mazaroff. He was a discovery of Bruno Walter's, who conducts here at his debut in Aida. The earlier volumes have shown an exceptional voice, but now we hear the artist. He gives a finely studied portrayal, shading sensitively and with no reluctance to sing softly. By his side, Maria Nemeth has a moment or two that recall the distinguished singer she had been. In the Carmen excerpts Mazaroff is a splendidly passionate Don Jose, playing to a Danish Carmen, Elsa Brems, of whom we hardly hear enough to judge but who seems to have no steel in the voice. Again Walter conducts, and though it is not easy to define his individuality we feel it from the start, and most strikingly at the end, where the 'Fate' motif weeps.
Most valuable of all is the Palestrina section. The marvellous score, its richness so intensely evocative, is clearly in the hands of a master. The individual performance that impresses most is Alfred Jerger's as Borromeo (a fine cameo too by Georg Maikl as the aged Patriarch of Assyria). Jerger's greatness as a performer becomes far more clear than in his studio recordings, and some of the Cardinal's most effective scenes are represented. It is really necessary here to have a score or libretto to hand. Similarly, in the excerpts from Franz Schmidt's Notre Dame, which (even thus armed) I found hard to follow. The recording is poor and the Esmeralda, Else Schulz, a wobbler. It was interesting to note how differently these two operas took to 'excerpting'. I was left with no desire to return to Notre Dame in its entirety, and can hardly wait for an opportunity to play through Palestrina again.'