On my weekly pilgrimages around the charity shops of Nottingham I have noticed an increasingly prevelant trend. There are NO rock or jazz records any more….NONE…unless already priced way beyond their feasible value by poor volunteers who shouted at if do not realise maximum profit from every e-bay checked piece of shit that comes through the door. At its most extreme this has resulted in Carpenters albums priced at £20 and Beatles records that unplayable priced at £100.

This has filtered through into mainstream collecting where now record fairs consistently dominated by mostly rock and soul and all in eye-watering prices. To all intent and purpose the rock vinyl area is a dead minefield full of scams and fools.

Because of this I increasingly over last few years been picking up classical LPs because one they cheap and two they more interesting. I would happily collect blue note jazz LPs but to date in 20 years I never found a single original in a charity shop just a few magazine reissues which new and very good to be honest.

Taking this less travelled road has brought some rarities that worth some money but generally unless mint forget collecting classical for profit unless prepared to spend big in first place. So I fritter what now my pension rather than wages on oddities and outliers and frankly the happier for it.

I will be posting more of these ‘OUTLIERS’ in future but here the first that I shared with my more knowledgable Beethoven collecting friend Neil earlier.

Jonel Perlea the Roumanian conductor was arrested by the Nazis and possibly sent to a concentration camp and the pianist is a Brazilian woman who impressed Debussy at her Paris Conservatoire entrance exam.

Guiomar Novaes was another senior artist who recorded extensively for Vox. With Perlea, she recorded Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no.5 in E flat op.73 – “Emperor” (Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, 1957, PL 511930 and Chopin’s Piano Concerto no.1 in E minor (Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, 18 May 1957, PL 10710).

The middle movement of the Beethoven is nicely handled but elsewhere Novaes’s unruffled moderation seems unaware of the greater matters at stake in this concerto. Perlea manages to inject some grandeur into his tutti during the first movement but in the finale the prevailing mood of matronly comfort reduces his contribution to the merely humdrum.

https://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2017/Jan/Perlea_forgotten.htm

more info here:

https://interlude.hk/forgotten-pianists-guiomar-novaes/

The VOX New York label was one of the earliest to produce stereo LPs this example is from 1957. That coincidental with the more well-known Sinatra LP ‘Where Are You’ recorded in stereo in September 1957 by Capitol.

Some early VOX classical LPs were actually mastered by RVG or Rudy Van Gelder as he known and the ‘GOD’ of Jazz recording. I inspected the dead wax on the LP and sure enough RVG STEREO printed on one side and Bell Sound on other!

So £1 well spent in Bullwell Scope then.

Here a small potted bio of the label gleaned from internet.

Vox recordings have been through the years a great resource for classical music collectors. Some artists like Horenstein, Swarowsky, Novaes, Frugoni,the Klemperer of the 50’s, Gielen, the young Brendel, the Hollywood String Quartet, and so many others made great recordings for them. Vox also provided great series of collections known as “Vox boxes” with complete sets of chamber music of all the major composers that are even today great resources for collectors, Vox was never an audiophile label, like, say RCA Living Stereo or Mercury Living Presence, and some of the recordings are actually lacking in audio quality (like the Horenstein recording of Stravinsky in Baden-Baden). But whatever was lacking in audio quality was largely compensated by the artistic quality and the clever repertoire choices. The most important recordings (from the artistic point of view) on this label were made, IMHO, in the late 50’s and throughout the 60’s. If I were to pick the best recordings that I own under the Vox label, I would choose two by Horenstein (Mahler 9th symphony and Bruckner 9th symphony) and one by Novaes (Chopin’s Nocturnes). Vox also owned the Candide label, devoted to modern classical music ( I treasure the recordings made by Martin and Milhaud of their own music)

Here the actual recording