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"Going For the Records: Ward Marston Makes Old Voices Sing Again" by Tim Page, The Washington Post, 21 February 1999 |
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"Wait a minute! You've got to hear this!" Ward Marston bobs and weaves gracefully through his spacious suburban home outside Philadelphia, feeling his way toward an 80-year-old recording that he believes represents the late American soprano Geraldine Farrar (1882-1967) at her very best. By all rights, this should take a while. Marston shares his living quarters with at least 25,000 78 rpm records, more than 500 early cylinders (wax and otherwise), some 5,000 LPs and a proportionate number of compact discs. Moreover, the 46-year-old Marston has been blind since birth, and must rely upon a mixture of memory, intuition and some old Braille-stamped bindings to find just what he wants. And yet, within moments, the recording is cued up and its owner is beaming. "Listen to that energy, that control!" he urges his visitors as the long-dead voice fills the room once more. Marston wants to bring out a compact disc devoted to Farrar's singing. He also intends to put together a 25-CD set that would trace the history of classical singing in France from the dawn of the recording era to the present. And then there is his plan to collect the voices of some celebrated figures from the Victorian era--Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Robert Browning; Florence Nightingale; and Sir Arthur Sullivan, all of whom made cylinder recordings in the late 19th century that Marston wants to remaster and re-release for 21st-century listeners. It all sounds quixotic in an era when an "oldie" often means something by the Beatles or Elvis Presley. Yet Marston has supervised more than 400 historic reissue projects in the past 15 years--for labels such as BMG Classics, EMI, CBS Masterworks, Romophone, Pearl, Biddulph and VAI. And more recently, he has launched his own record label with his partner, Scott Kessler, a label that is titled--appropriately enough--Marston. To date, Marston's company has re-released more than a dozen projects. These include the first complete version of Jules Massenet's "Manon" (a tremendous rarity originally issued in 1923 on 24 bulky, fragile and heavy 78 rpm discs, now distilled to two CDs); a number of vocal recitals, including the complete recorded legacies of 19th-century legends Adelina Patti and Victor Maurel; and individual sets featuring pianists Josef Hofmann, Ernst Levy and Emil von Sauer, the last of these a pupil of Franz Liszt. The Marston discs are splendidly packaged, with authoritative liner notes and illuminating photographs. One particularly impressive recording is the two-CD set dedicated to the art of the Romanian American soprano Alma Gluck (1882-1938). She is probably most commonly remembered today for her performance of James G. Bland's "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny" (which became the first disc to sell a million copies) and she recorded a good deal of other popular material, not all of it of the first order. Marston, sensing a historical injustice to her memory, has issued more than two hours of Gluck's best recordings--49 selections in all--that do justice to her bright, silvery tone, her innate command of baroque and classical style, and her limpid interpretive gifts. Another important soprano, Rosa Raisa (1893-1963), spent most of her American career in Chicago, where she became a local favorite. Unfortunately, then as now, the center of the American opera world was in New York and, for whatever reason, Raisa was never invited to sing at the Metropolitan Opera. Nor did she record for either of the two largest American record labels, Victor or Columbia. As such, she has been unjustly forgotten. Yet Washington Post music critic emeritus Paul Hume was certainly not alone in his his belief that Raisa's voice was the "greatest" he had ever heard. Her complete recordings are now issued on three Marston CDs, the sound of a magnificent dramatic soprano, full of emotional intensity and desperate passion, yet imbued with a certain arresting regal quality. Marston presses his discs in editions of 2,000; more can be made quickly on the off chance that one of them will sell out, but, as might be imagined, this is hardly a commercially driven endeavor. His biggest "hits" so far include the recordings devoted to Hofmann and Gluck. "This isn't a profession, nor is it an avocation," Marston says. "This is my life. I love good friends, good food, good wine, but preserving these historical documents . . ." He breaks off. "I can't even begin to say what that means to me. It sounds corny, but this is a true labor of love." And, as Marston says this, his large, expressive, sightless eyes trained vaguely on his guest, it doesn't sound corny at all. Marston was born in 1952. When he was 5, he came across an old record player and a stack of 78s in a relative's basement. He still doesn't know what it was about this chance encounter that moved him so deeply. "They put on an old Caruso recording for me--it was called 'Hosanna' and it was by a forgotten composer named Granier--and I asked them to play it over and over again. I was fascinated by the tune, by the singing, the sheer sense of history I felt when I was listening to the record." When Marston was 8, his parents took him to the Met to hear Leopold Stokowski conduct Puccini's "Turandot." After that, the boy was hooked. He began studying piano and became a solid jazz musician by the time he was in his teens. (He still performs today, mostly at private parties, some of them in the Washington area.) He also spent his spare time combing through the back rooms of Philadelphia record stores, where discontinued 78s might be found. By the time he entered Williams College, Marston had already built a substantial library. While at Williams, he became involved with the college radio station. "I wanted to play some of the great performances I had collected on the air," he once told the Boston Globe. "In the early 1970s, there weren't a lot of good transfers on LP, particularly of instrumental and orchestral material. I wanted to play the [Fritz] Kreisler performance of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto conducted by Leo Blech, and the only transfer was way off pitch. So I taught myself how to join the four-minute sides of 78 rpm recordings together and my method worked much better than what other people were doing at the time. Most people simply spliced together the sides, which to my ears sounded abrupt. It hurt my sense of musicianship to hear that jolt, so I worked at overlapping the sides." In 1976, Columbia Masterworks (now Sony Classical) engaged Marston to prepare an edition of some old Budapest String Quartet recordings. (Back-issue releases are usually rather profitable for record companies, since all recording costs and royalties have usually been paid.) Other offers followed, and before too long the name Ward Marston became synonymous with careful reissues of the great performances of the past. Marston calls his work "audio conservation" rather than "restoration." "When I start on a new project, I try first to get every single bit of sound I can off an old record and transfer it into a digital format," he explains. "Then I take out most of the clicks and pops--either one at a time or through a computer program. In the old days, when you removed the clicks and pops, you were also removing tiny bits of the music as well. Nowadays there are some computer programs that allow removal of the clicks without removing the music. Still, if you are overly zealous, you can do more harm than good. You simply have to expect a certain amount of surface noise from an old recording." The sound on Marston's discs is remarkably clean, however, even on the earliest and most primitive recordings he "conserves." Throughout his house one finds a wide variety of record players--old Victrolas, old Gramophones, machines that play the early Edison and Bettini wax cylinders--as well as modern turntables, DAT machines and tape recorders. Some early stereo recordings were made in 1932 by Bell Laboratories with the Philadelphia Orchestra. In these discs, the sonic information, rather than being buried within the grooves of the record, actually lies on the protruding groove itself. For a project such as this one, Marston has had to actually invent his own record player, featuring a sort of two-pronged, saddlelike needle that rides the groove as if it were a horse. Choosing the proper equipment on which to play an old recording is only the beginning of the battle, however. Although we refer to most early disc recordings generically as "78s," the pioneer companies actually made their records at anywhere between about 65 and 90 revolutions per minute. For example, one singer who recorded at an unusually slow speed was the tenor Fernando de Lucia; when his discs, originally made at about 69 to 72 rpm, were played (and then reissued) at the 78 speed, they gave his voice a bleating sound that did not reflect the glorious voice referred to by his contemporaries. As a result, only recently have authentic, appropriately pitched De Lucia recordings become the rule. Marston has a turntable that allows him to speed up or slow down the playing speed and therefore significantly change the pitch of any recording on which he is working. In addition to his efforts for his own label, Marston continues to work for other companies, including the splendid Romophone, which has issued most of the recordings of Rosa Ponselle, Elisabeth Schumann, Amelita Galli-Curci and Pol Plancon, among other distinguished singers. Most recently, Marston has completed a 10-CD collection in celebration of the 200th anniversary of "The President's Own" U.S. Marine Band. Beginning with a startlingly vivid "Farewell to Dresden" recorded informally in 1891 on a Columbia cylinder. It continues through the glory days of John Philip Sousa and on through the tenures of such band maestros as John R. Bourgeois and Timothy W. Foley (who leads the group today). It is a veritable treasure trove of 109 years of American music. Though not available commercially, 15,000 copies have been donated to libraries, schools and other institutions. Although Marston probably knows as much about recording equipment as anybody working today, he claims that his ear is the final arbiter. "I have been involved in music all my life, and I have a good idea in my head of what a violin, a piano, a singer sounds like," he once explained. "A lot of transfers of old recordings simply make them sound like old records. What I try to do is to make them sound as much as they can the way they would sound if they were live performances." What next? Down the line, Marston wants to do another complete Caruso collection; he is no longer satisfied with the early 1980s edition he created for Pearl Records. He is in the midst of a commemorative project for the Philadelphia Orchestra centennial next year. On the day of my visit, he was hurriedly preparing a transfer of the Hungarian composer Zoltan Kodaly conducting his own music in the 1940s; Philadelphia Orchestra music director Wolfgang Sawallisch wanted to hear it right away and a messenger was already en route. And he has some personal crusades. Marston considers the late contralto Dame Clara Butt (1873-1936)--known to Anglophiles of a certain age for her deep, booming renditions of "Rule Britannia!" and "Land of Hope and Glory"--a "much-maligned artist." "I love her work and want to do something wonderful with her," Marston says eagerly. "I can't think of any singer with better diction. And she had a great pitch sense, a gorgeous trill, and a surprising expertise in coloratura singing." He leans back in his chair and grins again. "And finally, her records touch the heart. And that's what it's all about. You know?" For a complete list of recordings on the Marston label call 610-690-1703 or fax 610-328-6355. The e-mail address is info@marstonrecords.com. © Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company
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