"I remember reading that some of the recordings of Richard Strauss' works , issued as being conducted by the composer, were actually under the baton of George Szell."
These stories pass from mouth to mouth and get exaggerated each time. So let's have Szell's own words:
“[There] was a session of his Don Juan scheduled … very early in the morning, a terrible, unpleasant November morning in Berlin, and Strauss had instructed me to go there and rehearse the orchestra so he [could] sleep an hour longer and then take over. … At that time pieces were split up into four-minute [segments],—and Don Juan was a sixteen-minute piece, therefore [in] four parts. I rehearsed the first part and then the second part … incidentally … from memory … and everybody was quite pleased. … Some time had lapsed and the producer got nervous … and said, ‘Dr. Strauss isn’t here yet, you have to conduct the first take.’ So I conducted the first four minutes, no Strauss visible. Then I was forced to conduct the second four minutes. And after having finished those, I turned around and saw Strauss, who had just arrived, in his big fur coat grinning all over his face and saying something which I might translate into, ‘Well, in this case one can cheerfully bite the dust if one sees such a young generation coming along,’ and directed that these two first parts were plenty good enough to go out under his name, he didn’t care to repeat them. So the very first record of Don Juan if it is still available somewhere, which was made in I think ’16, it must have been November ’16, were conducted by me, the first two sides, under his name.”
—George Szell, as quoted in Michael Charry’s “George Szell: A Life in Music”.
The same story was told by Szell in Gramophone of 5.1968.
So, not "some of R. Strauss's recordings" but "the first part of one of R. Strauss's recordings".
"I have, in addition, heard that some of Stravinsky's "Own recordings" were actually made by Robert Craft."
I cannot supply a direct quotation for this one, but as I understand it, Stravinsky's late performances and recordings were rehearsed by Craft in Stravinsky's presence. Stravinsky then got onto the podium for the actual performance/recording. In the case of recordings, though, a few parts needed retaking, to be spliced into the final master. Stravinsky didn't always have the energy to direct these little bits and pieces, usually of just a few bars, so Craft took the podium again. My understanding is that it is not possible to reconstruct the final editing procedures to work out exactly which little bits of a Stravinsky-conducted recording were actually conducted by Craft. But the basic performances were conducted by Stravinsky. You can, of course, argue that, in his by then frail state, his input was not all that great and he was really conducting Craft's performances. But he seems to have been happy with them.
Pierre Boulez attracted Stravinsky's opprobrium by claiming that most of Stravinsky's statements in the Stravinsky/Craft books, particularly those unfavourable to himself, were written by Craft. But Stravinsky seems to have been happy to own them.
Along another line, I may be able to shed light on the notable accuracy of piano roll recordings compared with the same pianists' acoustic recordings. One of my first music teachers told me he started his career cleaning up slips on piano rolls, including "correcting Paderewski's mistakes".
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