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Teri Noel Towe wrote (May 26, 2005):
[To Tom Hood] The Royale and the "Gramophone" pseudonymous recordings of the Mass in B Minor are, collectively, one of the greatest enigmas in the Bach discographies. I, too, recently acquired a copy of the Royale recording, which was unfindable 15 years ago when I began to put together the critical discography of the Mass that I contributed to Alan Blyth's anthology, Choral Music on Records. I did, however, write about the "Gramophone" set. Here, for what little it may be worth to you and the other subscribers to the List, is what I had to say about it:
The greatest question mark in the discography of the Mass in B Minor is the anonymous recording that appeared in the United States in the mid 1950s on the Gramophone (no relation to His Master's Voice) label. Neither the conductor nor the soloists are identified; the performance is ascribed simply to The Cathedral Choir and Symphony Orchestra. [24] On the basis of the pronunciations of words like "coeli", one would surmise that the performance is German in origin, and it is almost certainly a recording of a radio broadcast. Normally, recordings like this can be given short shrift in an article of this kind, but this set is the exception that proves the rule, for it fortuitously preserves an excellent, majestically paced "Romantic" interpretation of singular vision, commitment, and individuality, performed by a large chorus and orchestra and an exceptionally fine quintet of soloists. (There are two basses, and the soprano sounds suspiciously like Erna Berger.) Who was responsible for this magnificent reading is anybody's educated guess, but is it possible that this is a recording of an otherwise undocumented broadcast of the B Minor Mass conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler? One thing is certain; it does not closely resemble the interpretations of any of the conductors who made "commercial" recordings of the Mass during this period.
Because part of my LP collection currently is in storage and for practical purposes inaccessible, I am not yet able to compare the Royale and the "Gramophone" recordings to determine if they are the same pseudonymous performance, but I suspect that they are.
The contemporaneous "Balzer" St. Matthew Passion (BWV 244) on Royale is, in fact, the same broadcast performance conducted by Fritz Lehmann, that currently is available on Music & Arts CDs. The anonymous performance on "Gramophone" is also the Fritz Lehmann. Logic would suggest that the same kind of relationship exists between the "Gramophone" set and the Royale one.
From time to time, I have thought about trying to determine if there is a documented broadcast from that period that someone took down off the air and then used as the basis for the "Balzer" recordings.
You have mentioned Ernest Lumpe's magnificent and invaluable article, Pseudonymous Performers on Early LP Records: An Update, which is available on line at: http://www.hensteeth.com/lumpe02.html. I don't understand why the Royale recording of the Mass is not there, but Mr. Lumpe does discuss the anonymous performance on Gramophone, at least those portions of it that were used on the recording of excerpts that surely was derived from it:
Gramophone 2037: Bach Mass in B minor / St.Matthew Passion ('excerpts") (1953) "Varsity Chorale Ensemble" (no additional information given) The excerpts from the Mass in B Minor are unidentified. The portions from the St. Matthew Passion (BWV 244) are identical to the live 1949 performance captured on Vox DLP 6070 and issued completely on Royale 1290-93 (see above). Again, the inspected Varsity pressing is wrapped in a Gramophone sleeve. By the way, whoever chose the name "Joseph Balzer" was a canny customer, to say the least, because he or she selected a pseudonym close to but not the same as the name of a conductor who was active in Germany at the time. This deception ultimately muddied the waters for the discographers. In his invaluable Conductors on Record (Greenwood Press, 1982), John L. Holmes confuses Joseph Balzer with Hugo Balzer, a local German conductor who was born in 1894 and who was Music Director in Dusseldorf and Detmold in the 1930s and 1940s, and credits him as the conductor of the "Joseph Balzer" recordings.
I hope that this information is of some help to you, Mr. Hall.
I regret that I cannot be more helpful, and I regret have neither the time to do the research nor the particular and essential expertise that Mr. Lumpe has in order to do so, because I am as curious as you are to discover to whom this exciting reading of the Mass in B Minor, should be credited.
PS: Yoel: Thanks for making an exception to your rule about not forwarding posts. I am very glad that you did, because I most likely would never have come across Mr. Hood's inquiry had you not done so.
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