Welcome to July with a musical miscellany.

Hyde Park, London, in full summer bloom

Edward Johnson writes…

As is customary and traditional in the Column, the 1st of the month is marked with some suitably appropriate music. As always, it’s Tchaikovsky’s “The Seasons” which heads the list, being – to quote Wikipedia – “a suite of twelve short character pieces for solo piano, each one characteristic of a different month of the year in Russia.” They each have subtitles and poetic epigraphs and July’s subtitle is “Song of the Reaper.” The poetic epigraph reads: “Move the shoulders, shake the arms! And the noon wind breathes in the face!”

Wiki lists about a dozen arrangements but we start with the piano original, splendidly played by Olga Scheps in 2016 …

Next we have one of the many arrangements. Leonard Slatkin tells me he conducted a couple of times “a wonderful version by Morton Gould” and on his old 1951 Columbia LP, Gould played the piano part as well as conducting his specially assembled recording ensemble. He was an excellent pianist / arranger / conductor and here’s his take on July …

Equally splendid is the orchestration of “The Seasons” by David Matthews. The only complete performance of his arrangement was given by Carl Davis and the North German Radio Orchestra in 1991. I think it deserves a ‘first recording’, with Matthews’ 9-minute “Swan Lake Fantasy” for Solo Violin and Orchestra added as a delightful filler. Here’s Matthews’s “July” from the 1991 radio broadcast …

Here is another July, this time by Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel from her “Das Jahr” for piano, played here by Ellen Jansson …

Summer has just officially commenced, so here is Vivaldi to mark the event. I’ve chosen Stokowski and the NPO with Hugh Bean because it was a work Stokowski had never recorded or conducted before. It was during his “Phase 4 Stereo” period and the producer decided they needed “The Four Seasons” in their catalogue. This was in June 1966 when Stokowski was 84 years old. Hugh Bean was a great admirer of the old maestro and according to his widow, Mary Bean, the recording was made with no fuss. Stokowski would tell the control room to “put the light on” at the start of each movement, the players thinking it was a rehearsal. At the end of the take, Stokowski would ask the control room “Do you have it?” and with the reply “Yes, Maestro” he went straight onto the next movement. This meant the session finished sooner than expected and the players were able to get off home early, which made him very popular. Needless to say, his isn’t a “historically informed performance” but W. A. Chislett in the ‘Gramophone’ felt that Vivaldi “would have hugely enjoyed it if he could have heard it,” adding that “Hugh Bean plays brilliantly” and that it was “a dramatic performance which is surely what we want in avowed programme music” …