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The Itter Broadcast Collection
Posted by Mike Parr on February 12, 2021, 12:47 pm
Thanks to Adrian Farmer for providing a really interesting article about this collection. It shows how one small enthusiast was able to fill gaps in the documents of sound that would otherwise be lost to the world. Whatever the trust can salvage will be of lasting importance.
This is an exceptionally revealing piece into the Richard Itter Collection.
I've reviewed quite a number of Itter Collection CDs - of Karajan and Cantelli recordings, and then there are the magnificent Klemperer recordings as well. What is striking is not so much what it is preserved but what seems not to have been. The Karajan Tchaikovsky Fourth with the Philharmonia from 1955 (on the CD) was preceded by a Sibelius Fourth which was presumably never broadcast. This is frustrating with many of the known broadcast Cantelli and Klemperer concerts which are largely incomplete; often we have works by these conductors not recorded by them in the studio but performed in concert lost forever because the BBC made a choice not to broadcast them. Karajan, despite his more than ten-years with the Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted surprisingly few concerts with them in the UK but it seems even those he did conduct were not often recorded. Only a handful of the Cantelli ones were. But then this was not a predominantly concert orchestra in the 1950s.
It's also interesting reading of the disorganisation of the Itter tapes. This, I think, seems and sounds fairly typical of my experience with collectors of a certain age, especially those who have used tape as a broadcast medium. The cutting off of announcements, tail-ending works and adding entirely different works to tapes from an entirely different concert are common. (I once found Varese's Ameriques tagged on to the end of Beethoven's Missa solemnis.) Often someone won't record an entire concert (something I freely admit to often doing) - which is no good for an archive. And yes, handwriting is a frustration - ink fades over the years, if it can be deciphered at all. One has to rely on the accuracy of what is written for dates, or it becomes a bit of an investigation. A broadcast date is not necessarily a performance date, for example - this is particularly true of many American, and some European recordings. There are oddities. I've only once come across a recording where both the broadcaster and the orchestra denied playing and broadcasting the concert despite the announcements telling us otherwise.
Still, I do look forward to hearing more of these Itter releases in the near future. There are a number of recordings I hope there might be there....
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Thanks to Adrian Farmer for providing a really interesting article about this collection. It shows how one small enthusiast was able to fill gaps in the documents of sound that would otherwise be lost to the world. Whatever the trust can salvage will be of lasting importance.