Ansermet Redux

Fascinated by recordings at an early age, but saddled with a kid’s limited budget and even more limited accessibility from my perch in a western Denver suburb, I discovered Ernest Ansermet and the Suisse Romande orchestra by sheer happenstance. In America they were issued on the “London Stereo Treasury” label, this side of the pond’s answer to Decca’s “Ace of Diamonds” budget reprints in Europe. Decca was not apt to offer their highest-ranked artists on Stereo Treasury—no Solti, no Curzon, etc. But the prolific Ansermet and his Geneva orchestra were fair game.

As a result, they showed up at a nearby market, a 7-11 in all but name, stacked up in the tiny set of record racks, most of which held junk of the “101 Strings Play Movie Classics” variety—RCA Camden for the most part. But they also stocked whatever the latest London Stereo Treasury discs were coming from their distributor, and those included a fair sampling of Ansermet. Best of all, I could buy a few of those on a regular basis given their modest prices, something like $1.50 at a time when a fine Deutsche Grammophon would set me back a whopping $5.00 or so—far too much for my skinny pocketbook with its funds acquired mostly via bagging groceries at the local King Soopers. And getting better records meant cajoling my mother to take me to a big shopping center. She detested driving so that took some doing.

London Stereo Treasury: they all looked like this

So I stocked up on London Stereo Treasury LPs. I still have a few of them to this day, and taking them out for an examination I’m quite taken with the quality of the vinyl pressings, far superior to those horrid RCA Camdens with their cheap recycled vinyl that snapped, crackled, and popped even when new. The jacket art was simple but at least it was in full color, obviously designed to dispense with graphic designers since each cover looked more or less the same: white, black print, and a rectangular color photo in the bottom two-thirds. But they weren’t unattractive and they didn’t scream ‘cheap’ the way the Camdens did. And they sounded great.

It made for an odd introduction to the orchestral repertory. Ansermet and the Suisse Romande weren’t typically entrusted with Brahms or Schumann or Wagner; they got Debussy, Ravel, Dukas, Honegger, Martin, and the like. They did a gorgeous job with those, to be sure. But that lopsided repertory meant that I knew Paul Dukas’ score to the ballet La Peri before I knew the Beethoven 7th. I also picked up some chamber music thanks to the Borodin Quartet and certain Shostakovich quartets. 

I think my experience might be matched by a lot of folk my age. During a golden age for recordings, Decca gave the Genevans a massive go and provided posterity with a whopping harvest of truly first-rate recordings of a truly second-rate orchestra. But while they couldn’t hope to match the Berlin or Vienna Phils, or American powerhouses like Philadelphia, Cleveland, and New York on Columbia, or Boston and Chicago on RCA, Decca and the Genevans offered superior audio and a much wider-ranging repertory than the American labels were producing. 

The Ansermet-Suisse-Romande recordings have had a somewhat spotty history in the digital world but they’ve really never been wholly unavailable. Decca brought them out in decent remasterings in a set of boxes organized by repertoire—European Tradition, French, Modern—which brought a lot of fascinating performances back to light. Now they've re-done the lot, both the monophonic and stereo recordings, in two sizeable box sets. Me being me, I snapped both of them up, just as I snapped up those earlier sets. I have too many fond memories of those recordings to let these pass by, especially with their new remasterings that bring out more detail than ever before.

It is my practice to rip box sets to my digital library, complete with scans of the jacket art. Such industry is time-consuming but I enjoy it. A fellow's hobby and all that. From time to time I dip into the Ansermet collections for fun and/or enlightenment and/or a nostalgic charge. Ansermet's set of the complete Beethoven symphonies gave me a bit of a surprise. I had assumed they wouldn’t be worth bothering with in comparison to contemporary sets such as Herbert von Karajan's 1963 masterpieces on Deutsche Grammophon or Szell’s diamond-precision Cleveland jobbers on Epic/Columbia. But in fact Ansermet's renditions are worth going over in detail; many of them seem to channel the future performance practice movement, and allowing for the occasional icky wind intonation or scrappy strings, they’re really quite effective.

Without a doubt Ansermet is at his best in the faster movements and at his least in the slow movements; among my test movements for Beethoven symphonies is the second movement of the Second Symphony, and this one’s something of a clunker. But the first movement is terrific. The Fourth is given a dandy rendition. The Eroica isn’t one of the great ones by any means, but it holds up well enough. 

This business of re-issuing oldies-but-goodies in remastered digital audio is a great one for nostalgic duffers like me. But for younger listeners it can be a terrific way to build a fine recorded music library with modest expense—provided that younger listeners have the slightest interest in owning copies, as opposed to depending on streaming for access. But you can stream these remastered jobbers just as well as sell them in box sets (and that’s happening), so as far as I can tell it’s a win-win scenario for everybody. For every modern recording of something, there are dozens—maybe hundreds—of earlier ones. And anything after the mid-1950s just might offer audio quality that can compete with the best of today. Nor are earlier recordings to be sniffed at: would anybody want to be without, say, the Schnabel Beethoven sonata recordings just because they're in 1930s monophonic audio?

A big hit for me in 1968

I flash to my teenage self, sprawled on the floor in my bedroom in the western Denver suburb of Applewood, glued to my RCA Victor record player with its separate red-cloth-covered speakers, spinning my just-acquired London Stereo Treasury disc of Debussy’s Printemps in Ansermet’s lively performance, Decca’s superlative audio obvious enough even through the no-doubt limited mush of that record player. You can’t go home again, but at least you can revisit those moments of quiet happiness within the chaotic churn of adolescence.