COLUMBIA UK 3-LPs SAX 2470-2: Juilliard String Quartet - Mozart Haydn 4tets - UK
C$
800
$
645
C$ 800
Sold For
Nov 29, 2017
Sold Date
Oct 20, 2017
Start Date
C$ 1300
Start price
1
Number Of Bids
Canada
Country Of Seller
eBay
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Description
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Background -
If you are looking at this listing then you are likely aware that this is one of the "holy grails" in classical music collecting. A superb copy of these reference performances that any hardened collector would be happy to own.The Juilliard String Quartet is a classical music string quartet founded in 1946 at the Juilliard School in New York. The original members were violinists Robert Mann and Robert Koff, violist Raphael Hillyer, and cellist Arthur Winograd. Since the Quartet's inception in 1946, it has been the quartet-in-residence at the Juilliard School. It has received numerous awards, including four Grammys and membership in the National Academy Recording Arts and Sciences’ Hall of Fame. In February 2011, the Juilliard Quartet received the NARAS Lifetime Achievement Award for its outstanding contributions to recorded classical music.
The quartet plays a wide range of classical music, and has recorded works by composers such as Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Bartók, Debussy, and Shostakovich, while also promoting more contemporary composers such as Elliott Carter, Ralph Shapey, Henri Dutilleux and Milton Babbitt. It has performed with other noted musicians such as Aaron Copland, Glenn Gould, Benita Valente and also (in its earlier days) with the famous scientist Albert Einstein. They have participated on the soundtrack of the "Immortal Beloved" movie.
Robert Mann (born July 19, 1920) is a violinist, composer, conductor, and founding member of the Juilliard String Quartet, as well as a faculty member at the Manhattan School of Music. Mann, the first violinist at Juilliard, served on the school's string quartet for over fifty years until his retirement in 1997.
Mann has played and performed on many instruments, including those made by Antonio Stradivari and John Young. Mann was the subject of a 2014 documentary, titled Speak the Music.
At the invitation of Juilliard’s president, William Schuman, Mann founded the Juilliard String Quartet in 1946 and served as the ensemble’s first violinist until his retirement from the quartet in 1997. The quartet, which celebrated its golden jubilee during the 1996–97 season, had played approximately 5,000 concerts and performed more than 600 works, including some 100 premieres. Its discography includes recordings of more than 100 compositions. They have received three Grammy awards for their recordings.
Isidore Cohen (December 16, 1922, Brooklyn, New York – June 23, 2005, Bronx, New York) was a renowned chamber musician and violinist, as well as a former member of the Juilliard String Quartet and Beaux Arts Trio.
Cohen began studying violin at age six, and graduated from the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan, although his intention was to become a doctor. His pre-med studies at Brooklyn College were interrupted by a serving in Europe with the U.S. Army during World War II. From there on, his career focus changed as he decided he'd rather touch people's lives through music.
Upon returning to civilian life, he became a student of Ivan Galamian at Juilliard. Galamian had misgivings about accepting a 24-year-old student, but wanted to help a war veteran. From there, his life as a musician started to blossom, even drawing the attention of Igor Stravinsky with his performance of Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat. He became well known for his attention given to modern composers, and notably worked closely on many pieces with John Cage.
As of the 1950s, Cohen was serving as the concertmaster of the orchestras at the Casals festivals in France and Puerto Rico, in addition to several ensembles in New York City including the Colombia symphony orchestra. He was frequently concertmaster for Leonard Bernstein's televised "young people's concerts". His performance As concertmaster under Stravinsky's baton of "The rite of spring" is one of those preserved on the gold album carried by the voyager spacecraft. In 1952 Alexander Schneider invited Cohen to join his quartet as second violinist. During Cohen's tenure, the Schneider quartet recorded the first complete set of Joseph Haydn's string quartets, a milestone noted in Time magazine.
Beginning in 1958, Cohen became second violinist of the Juilliard String Quartet, a post he held for nearly a decade. As a member of the quartet, Cohen also served on faculty at Juilliard from 1958 to 1966.
In 1968, following the retirement of violinist Daniel Guilet, he was persuaded to join the Beaux Arts Trio by pianist Menahem Pressler and cellist Bernard Greenhouse. By the mid-1970s they were touring and recording as the world's best-known and busiest piano trio. During Cohen's time with the trio, dozens of recordings were released, including the complete piano trios of Ludwig van Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, Dvo?ák, Brahms, as well as works by Chopin, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Charles Ives, and Dmitri Shostakovich. After twenty-three years with the group, he was succeeded as violinist by Ida Kavafian.
As a teacher, Cohen was on faculty at numerous institutions and festivals in addition to Juilliard, including the Aspen Music Festival the Curtis Institute of Music, Princeton University, SUNY at Stony Brook, and the Manhattan School of Music. His longest association was with the Marlboro Music Festival, where beginning in 1966 he taught for nearly forty years.
Raphael Hillyer (April 10, 1914 – December 27, 2010) was an American viola soloist, teacher. Born Raphael Silverman in Ithaca, New York, his career included playing in the Boston Symphony Orchestra and co-founding the Juilliard String Quartet. Hillyer was still lecturing and teaching viola at Boston University during the final month of his life.
Hillyer was a founding member of the Juilliard String Quartet. He was born in 1914 to a family with a musical background: his mother was a pianist and his father, a mathematician, also was an amateur violist. Hillyer's formal violin studies began in 1921, and his youthful passion for music was further ignited on a trip with his parents in 1924 to Leningrad, Russia where he studied with Sergei Korgueff and an 18-year-old Dmitri Shostakovich. At the age of 16 Hillyer attended the Curtis Institute of Music, followed by studies at Dartmouth College, from which he graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a mathematics degree in 1936. He then completed graduate work in music under Walter Piston and Hugo Leichtentritt at Harvard University, where he played frequent recitals with his friend and classmate, Leonard Bernstein.
In 1942, Hillyer joined the Boston Symphony Orchestra as a violinist under Serge Koussevitsky and played with the Stradivari Quartet alongside Boston Symphony violist, Eugene Lehner, who became his mentor. In 1946, at the urging of Lehner, Hillyer, until then a violinist, prepared for an audition with a new quartet that was in need of a violist. With a borrowed viola and an intensity for which he was becoming well known, Hillyer played the audition and was chosen to be the violist and founding member of what became the Juilliard String Quartet. Hillyer remained with the Juilliard String Quartet for 23 years, recording, teaching and concertizing—championing new music and reinvigorating chamber music. After retiring from the Juilliard String Quartet in 1969, Hillyer performed frequently as soloist and collaborator with other chamber music groups. He also intensified the work he had grown passionate about: teaching and mentoring young musicians throughout the world. He was a guiding force behind the Tokyo String Quartet for decades. Hillyer continued to teach at Boston University until his death. On December 6, 2010, he taught his very last class, which was described by those in attendance as "as passionate and illuminating as any he had ever taught."
Claus Adam (November 5, 1917 – July 4, 1983) was an influential American cellist and cello teacher as well as a composer. His music teachers include Emanuel Feuermann (cello), Stefan Wolpe (composition), and Leon Barzin (conducting) He served as the second cellist of the Juilliard String Quartet, replacing Arthur Winograd in 1955. Joel Krosnick, a former student of his, replaced him as cellist of the quartet in 1974. He devoted the last decade of his life primarily to musical composition, and several of his works—including a cello concerto and a string trio—are published by G. Schirmer.
Adam lived in Indonesia until he was six. His father, Tassilo Adam, was an ethnologist there. He then went to Europe and studied in Salzburg. In 1929 he went to the USA.
The "Haydn" Quartets by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart are a set of six string quartets published in 1785 in Vienna as his Op. 10, dedicated to the composer Joseph Haydn. They are considered to be the pinnacle of Classical string quartet writing, containing some of Mozart's most memorable melodic writing and refined compositional thought.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed 23 string quartets. The six "Haydn" Quartets were written in Vienna during the years 1782 to 1785. They are dedicated to the composer Joseph Haydn, who is considered the creator of the modern string quartet. Haydn had recently completed his influential "Opus 33" set of quartets in 1781, the year that Mozart arrived in Vienna. Mozart studied Haydn's string quartets and began composing this set of six, which were published in 1785. During this time, Haydn and Mozart had become friends, and sometimes played quartets together in Mozart's apartment, with Mozart playing the viola, and Haydn playing violin; see Haydn and Mozart.
Haydn first heard the quartets at two gatherings at Mozart's home, 15 January and 12 February 1785 (on these occasions he apparently just listened, rather than playing a part himself). After hearing them all, Haydn made a now-famous remark to Mozart's father Leopold, who was visiting from Salzburg: "Before God, and as an honest man, I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name. He has taste, and, what is more, the most profound knowledge of composition." The comment was preserved in a letter Leopold wrote 16 February to his daughter Nannerl.
In the '50s, there was a string quartet for everybody. For the traditionalist, there was the Austro-Anglo Amadeus Quartet. For the sentimentalist, there was the Hungarian-Russo-American Budapest Quartet. And for the modernist there was the New York, NY, Juilliard Quartet. In the '50s, the group's Bartók quartets were on every Danish modern coffee table and its Schoenberg quartets were in front of every Picasso print. Surprisingly, the Juilliard Quartet musicians were also masters when it came to the Viennese High Classical composers, and, even more surprisingly, they remained faithful to their modernist performance style even in that repertoire. On this disc assembling recordings of Mozart, Haydn, and Schubert from 1957 and 1959, the playing is supremely polished, but also clean and without affectation. The tone is deeply burnished, but cool and without sentimentality. The interpretations are dedicated, but objective, compelling but clear-eyed. If a traditionalist might say the Juilliard Quartet lacks understanding of the style and a sentimentalist might say it lacks sympathy for the music, a modernist and Buddhist would say that detachment is crucial for true compassion. Columbia's sound is antique but honest. - James Leonard
The Juilliard String Quartet recorded Mozart's six "Haydn" Quartets at least twice, once in the early 1960s for Epic and then again with a different musician lineup for CBS in the mid 1970s. Robert Mann (violin) and Raphael Hillyer (viola) played in both sets; Isidore Cohen (violin) and Claus Adam (cello) were replaced by Earl Carlyss (violin) and Joel Krosnick (cello) in the 1970s set [actually, Claus Adams is listed as the cellist for Quartets #18 and 19 of the second set]. This 3 LP Columbia SAX set consisted of the UK pressings of the Epic recordings issued by EMI/Columbia. It is both rare and quite expensive.
I have listened to both sets from the Juilliard, and in all honesty, it's hard for me to pick a clear winner. Both are excellent, in my opinion. The Epic set opens with the cheerful Quartet #14 in G major. One of my first impressions was how tight the ensemble was; the quartet truly plays as a single organic entity. Intonation is predominantly spot on. Perhaps these observations come as no surprise, since these recordings were made following a series of international tours in Europe and Asia that the Juilliard Quartet made as "cultural ambassadors", so I think they had a lot of opportunities to find their groove. The Adagio opening to Quartet #19 "Dissonant" is played with such beauty; I love the way the Juilliard has such control of their dynamics as they play those rising crescendos. This very solemn but dramatic introduction paves the way for the Allegro which the Juilliard conveys with such joy and energy. "The Hunt" is also given an excellent performance, and I especially enjoyed listening to the final movement in which the Juilliard Quartet turns up the heat.
The sound quality here is very good with a nice analog warmth and clarity to it. Sitting in the sweet spot between my speakers, I was able to appreciate the spatial separation of instruments. - milestomozart
LPs made by COLUMBIA UK / EMI Records, in the UK / England / Great Britain
LPs released in 1963 on very heavy vinyl
LPs are recorded in STEREO
Record Catalog Number: SAX 2470-2 (SMS 1016)
Record Labels are primarily TURQUOISE and SILVER with BLACK lettering - earliest pressings possible!
Mozart // Juilliard String Quartet
Mozart: The "Haydn" Quartets
String Quartet No. 14 In G Major, K. 387
String Quartet No. 15 in D Minor, K. 421
String Quartet No. 16 in E flat major, K. 428/421b
String Quartet No. 17 in B-flat major, K. 458 “The Hunt”
String Quartet No. 18 in A Major, K. 464
String Quartet No. 19 In C Major, K. 465 "Dissonant"
Performers -• Cello – Claus Adam
• Composed By – Mozart
• Viola – Raphael Hillyer
• Violins – Isidore Cohen, Robert MannCONDITION Details:
The 3-LP box is in near mint minus condition! The box has NO splits or crushed corners - just gorgeous! The corners and seams are solid with just some light shelf wear. The colors on the box are sharp and clean (see pictures with this listing as they are of the actual item).
The set comes complete with the often missing, small paper insert/libretto.
The 3-LPs are in near mint minus condition! We found that the vinyl looked superb on this vintage LP set. There are no significant marks and the LPs retain much of the original gloss and sheen - obviously well taken care of! They do have a bit of dust and perhaps a finger print or two on them so they should be cleaned before playing. There are NO serious spindle marks on the record labels either. Just beautifully made UK vinyl! That said, acquiring a vintage LP like this is for the performance and rarity of the LP, not necessarily for the sound quality.
A Short Note About LP GRADING - Mint = Only used for sealed items. Near Mint = Virtually flawless in every way. Near Mint Minus = Item has some minor imperfections, some audible. Excellent = Item obviously played and enjoyed with some noise. Very Good Plus = Many more imperfections which are noticeable and obtrusive.For best results, always properly clean your LPs before playing them.
The LP is an audiophile quality pressing (any collector of fine MFSL, half speeds, direct to discs, Japanese/UK pressings etc., can attest to the difference a quality pressing can make to an audio system).
Don't let this rarity slip by!!!