This is  Willem Mengelbergs RAREST Victor Recording - try to find another complete set!

THIS ONE IS EXCEPTIONALLY QUIET - TRANSCRIPTION QUALITY

It also is the weirdest piece of music he recorded. So, two distinctions for this World War I hangover piece.

Composed by the only pupil the great Paderewski ever took on, Ernest Schilling

[M]BVE33554-3/55-2/56-4/57-2
[78s]US Victor 1127~8
New York Philharmonic Orchestra
recorded on October 9, 1925, in New York

2x10" original Issue Victor records in great generic album

Condition:EXCELLENT faint scuffs, plays very quiet faint hiss

A CHOICE COPY

Next up, Ernest Schelling's A Victory Ball (a.k.a. Fantasy for Orchestra) was inspired in 1922 by Alfred Noyes' impassioned anti-war poem. It is 14 mainly hectic minutes of music by a composer-conductor who knew too much music by others, especially Ravel's brand-new La valse.

At the beginning of the century, Schelling toured Europe, South and North America with brilliant success, gaining a reputation as a remarkable pianist. He then took a post as the court musician to the Duchess of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, and began to compose as well. Schelling wrote many works that were often played during his lifetime, including works for piano, orchestra, and chamber groups. Since his death these have regrettably fallen from the repertoire. His most popular work was æA Victory Ball,Æ a symphonic poem for orchestra based on a poem by Alfred Noyes, which received very appreciative reviews in America and Europe.

In 1917, he joined the U.S. Army intelligence corps, and served bravely in the First World War. He was highly decorated not just by the U.S., but also by Poland, Spain and France, and was discharged as a Major at the end of the war.

In 1924, Schelling was appointed conductor of the Young PeopleÆs Concerts of the New York Philharmonic Symphonic Society. These childrenÆs concerts were to take up the bulk of his time and energy for the rest of his life. The concerts were a combination of lecture, picture show and orchestral performance that he designed to encourage in children a love and understanding of music. He not only conducted these concerts in New York but all over the country and even the world, earning great success everywhere from Philadelphia and Los Angeles to London and Rotterdam. From 1936 to 1938, he also took on an appointment as music director of the Baltimore Symphony.

Schelling was also very active in many other aspects of musical life. He organized benefits for composers, worked with the Musicians Relief Fund, and was the president of the Edward MacDowell Association beginning in 1929. He was friendly with most of the great musicians from America and Europe and often entertained them at his summer home on Lake Geneva. He greatly facilitated the acceptance of American music and musicians in Europe and helped bring many great European musicians to America, including Enrique Granados whom Schelling championed until GranadosÆ untimely death in 1916. Schelling died in his home in New York City on December 8, 1939.

Joseph Willem Mengelberg (28 March 1871 û 22 March 1951) was a Dutch conductor.

Biography
Mengelberg was born fourth of sixteen children to German born parents in Utrecht, Netherlands. He studied in the Cologne conservatory, including piano and composition. He was chosen as General Music Director of the city of Lucerne Switzerland at age 21.[1] where was conductor of an orchestra and a choir, directed a music school, taught piano lessons and continued to compose.

Mengelberg is highly renowned for his work as the principal conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra from 1895 to 1945. In addition, Mengelberg founded the long-standing Mahler tradition of Concertgebouw. In 1902 he met Gustav Mahler and became friends with him. Mengelberg was instrumental in introducing most of Mahler's work to The Netherlands, and Mahler regularly visited The Netherlands to introduce his work to Dutch audiences. In fact, he edited some of his symphonies while in the Netherlands, making them sound better for the acoustics of Concertgebouw. This is perhaps one reason that this concert hall and its orchestra is renowned for its Mahler tradition.

Nevertheless, Mengelberg's importance as a conductor was not only due to his Mahler interpretations. He was also, for example, an exceptionally gifted performer of Richard Strauss; and even today his recordings of Strauss's tone poem Ein Heldenleben which has been dedicated to him and the Concertgebouw Orchestra are widely regarded by critics as among the best ù if not the very best ù of this piece ever made.

One criticism of Mengelberg's influence over Dutch musical life, most clearly articulated by the composer Willem Pijper, was that Mengelberg did not particularly champion Dutch composers during his Concertgebouw tenure, especially after 1920.[2]

Mengelberg with The New York TimesMengelberg was music director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra from 1922 to 1928. Beginning in January 1926, he shared the podium with Arturo Toscanini; Toscanini biographer Harvey Sachs has documented that Mengelberg and Toscanini clashed over interpretations of music and even rehearsal techniques, creating division among the musicians that eventually resulted in Mengelberg leaving the orchestra. However, the maestro did make a series of recordings with the Philharmonic for both the Victor Talking Machine Company and Brunswick Records, including a 1927 electrical recording of Ein Heldenleben that was later reissued on LP and CD.

The most controversial aspect of Mengelberg's biography centers around his actions and behavior during the years of the Nazi occupation of Holland between 1940 and 1945. Some newspaper articles of the time gave the appearance that he acquiesced to the presence of the Nazi's ideological restrictions on particular composers. Explanations have ranged from political naivetT in general, to a general "blind spot" of criticism of anything German, given his own ancestry. Because of Mengelberg's co-operation with the occupying regime in The Netherlands during World War II, he was banned from conducting in the country by the Dutch government after the war in 1945. He was stripped of his honours and his passport. The original judgment was that Mengelberg would be banned from conducting in the Netherlands for the remainder of his life. Appeals by his attorneys led to a reduction in the sentence to a banning of six years from conducting, retroactively applied to start from 1945. This notwithstanding, he continued to draw a pension from the orchestra until 1949 when cut off by the city council of Amsterdam.[3] Mengelberg retreated in exile to Zuort, Sent, Switzerland, where he remained until his death in 1951, just two months before the expiration of his exile order.

Willem Mengelberg was the uncle of the musicologist and composer Rudolf Mengelberg and of the conductor, composer and critic Karel Mengelberg, who was himself the father of the prominent improvising pianist and composer Misha Mengelberg.

[edit] Recorded Legacy
In addition to his acclaimed recordings of Richard Strauss' Ein Heldenleben, Mengelberg left valuable discs of symphonies by Beethoven and Brahms, not to mention a wildly controversial but gripping reading of Bach's St. Matthew Passion.

His most characteristic performances are marked by a tremendous expressiveness and freedom of tempo, perhaps most remarkable in his recording of Mahler's fourth Symphony but certainly present in the aforementioned St Matthew Passion and other performances as well. These qualities, shared (perhaps to a lesser extent) by only a handful of other conductors of the era of sound recording, such as Wilhelm FurtwSngler and Leonard Bernstein, make much of his work unusually controversial among classical music listeners; recordings that more mainstream listeners consider unlistenable will be hailed by others as among the greatest recordings ever made.

Many of his recorded performances, including some live concerts in Amsterdam during World War II, have been reissued on LP and CD. While he was known for his recordings of the German repertoire, Capitol Records issued a powerful, nearly high fidelity recording of Cesar Franck's Symphony in D minor, recorded in the 1940s with the Concertgebouw Orchestra.

Due to the Dutch government's six-year ban on Mengelberg's conducting activities, he made no more recordings after 1945. Some of his performances in Amsterdam were recorded on the innovative German tape recorder, the Magnetophon, resulting in unusually high fidelity for the time.

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