Music: Discs for Dilettanti

The three big U. S. phonograph record manufacturers (RCA Manufacturing Co., Decca, American Record Corp.) have been doing a steadily improving business since the abysmal days of 1933. Last week three small record companies were making good news for U. S. disc-dilettanti. Founded by earnest amateurs of music, all were operating in Manhattan, all on smallish budgets. For their material, all had gone into the byways of classical music, in some cases with such gratifying results that the big recording companies were following their lead.

Musicraft. Last February Musicraft Records, Inc. was the first of the three new little firms on the market with such discs. A youngish Manhattan lawyer named Milton L. Rein and a music teacher named Henry Cohen formed the firm, took in Herman Adler, a musical researcher from Germany, as digger-in-chief for recordable works.

Musicraft has its own small studio in Manhattan, like the other small firms farms out the pressing of its discs. Its artists include the Perole Quartet, Harpsichordists Ralph Kirkpatrick & Dr. Ernst Victor Wolff and (for future releases) Pianist Kathleen Long, able Britisher who is known among disc-collectors for her Mozart, and who made her U. S. concert debut in Manhattan last fortnight.

With 60% of its business outside Manhattan, Musicraft sales this month were twice those of July, four times those of February. A rare Bach secular cantata called The Coffee Cantata proved so popular when released last month that Victor soon came out with a secular cantata of its own, Peasant Cantata. Last week’s chief Musicraft offering was two of Bach’s Trio Sonatas for Organ, played by Organist Carl Weinrich on the Westminster Choir School organ in Princeton.

Most organ records are bad, and to purists Bach sounds too thick, too soft, when played on an organ built, as most modern organs are, on 19th Century lines. According to Musicraftsman Adler, the clean, transparent tone of the Trio Sonatas derives from the 17th Century-style engineering of the Westminster organ (built by Aeolian-Skinner and equaled in “baroque” tone only by the organs of Wellesley College and the Germanic Museum at Harvard).

Timely. Simply because he and his friends liked rare music, a Manhattan casualty insurance man named Leo Waldman acquired, last May, Timely Recording Co., which had made and sold some left-wing “workers’ songs.” For his musical adviser and program annotator. Insurance Man Waldman signed up William Kozlenko, music critic and editor of One-Act Play Magazine. Timely’s first offering, out last week, proved a notable find—eight brief symphonies by an almost-forgotten British composer named William Boyce (1710-79).

So short that sometimes two movements are played on one ten-inch side, the Boyce works are melodious, inventive, contrapuntally ingenious. They were conducted by Mr. Waldman’s part-time associate, Max Goberman, onetime pupil of Leopold Auer, onetime violinist in the Philadelphia Orchestra, at present assistant concertmaster in Andre Kostelanetz’ radio orchestra. Messrs. Waldman and Goberman declare that their firm, which will issue an old and a new work every month (first new one: two octets by Dmitri Shostakovich), will put profits, if any, into the making of more & better discs.

Gamut. Daniel Wolfert, 23, a teacher of the history and appreciation of music at Brooklyn College, launched Gamut Records last June. By last week some three dozen dealers (mostly in Manhattan) were handling Gamut discs. Music Lover Wolfert does his own choosing of records and directing. Best Gamut record to date is a Bach Partita, one of 19 keyboard collections of the prolific German, played on the harpsichord by Dr. Wolff.