JAVS Fall 1998

35

and organ was one that Primrose would re turn to, but of his major colleagues only Paul Doktor emulated this instrumental combina tion. The final two tracks on the CD made up Primrose's most popular 78; how sweetly and yet how unsentimentally he could sing even such a hackneyed tune as Dvorak's Humoresque or Ethelbert Nevin's best-selling religious ballad The Rosary. In the 1950s Primrose recorded for Ameri can Columbia Walton's Concerto and Hin demith's Der Schwanendreher, which have not been seen since an Odyssey LP reissue, but the expansive Mozart Sinfonia Concertante with Stern and Casals has reappeared (Sony SMK 58953), as has the trim Harold with Beecham (Sony MPK 47679). He also made a couple of LPs for Capitol; a Bloch program has disappeared but the Brahms Sonatas with Firkusny are available in America and Europe (EMI 66065) and in Japan (EMI ORG 3002). Primrose's official recording of the Bartok Concerto, which he commissioned, was done for Peter Bartok's label; but it is not available on CD. Two other versions are on

good to have Primrose's incisive performance, even with a few tiny flaws and some ineradi cable extraneous noise during the muted Air. Then there are the encores. Like Tertis, Prim rose generally based his transcriptions on previous adaptations for the violin: examples here (apart from the Heifetz trifles) are Lema and Ipanema from Claude Levy's version of Milhaud's early piano cycle Saudades do Brasil; and Mendelssohn's May Breeze tran scribed by Kreisler. A pair of the latter's Vi ennese delights-Schon Rosmarin and a con vincing Liebeslied-complete a program which should please connoisseurs of string playing. Also of interest are the fill-ups to the Pearl edition of the Walton Concerto and Flos Campi: the coupling of Bach's Come, Sweet Death (No. 42 in the Schemeligesangbuch) and Schubert's Litanei. The Schubert piece is Prim rose's most Tertis-like 78rpm disc; indeed, his manner of attacking the Bach suggests he knew Tertis's record of it, and although Tertis never recorded this Schubert song, transcriptions of other Schubert lieder were featured in his programs. The effective combination of viola

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