Leopold Stokowski conducts the NY Philharmonic in performance of Tchaikovsky Symphony #5 Op. 64.

I’m unsure when this recording of the matinee broadcast was made by Mr. Marchant. From searching the excellent NY Philharmonic archives I see two candidates - October 19th, 1947 and November 13th, 1949. Both are in the time period that Mr. Marchant was making these recordings off a direct line in a Minneapolis radio station. Earlier performances are before the existence of magnetic audio tape (what this collection is based on), and as far as I have been able to tell November 13th 1949 was the last time Stokowski conducted #5 with the NYPSO.

Unfortunately there are no other useful clues to help out. On the box was written Flor Quartet - which I have plenty of on this channel but clearly this is not it. This was also written: "Strauss Rosenkavalier/Vaughan Williams - Fantasia” but the other snippets of music that are on the tape are not those pieces either. Jim Fassett does mention (not included in this video) that coming up were pieces by Bloch and David Diamond - and the tape does have part of that music. But those pieces (conducted by Stokowski) were performed a week earlier than one of my candidate dates - on November 6th 1949. There is a bit of those pieces that might be salvageable I’ll consider for a future video.

Things were not helped by Mr. Marchant's typical brutal edits and nonsensical ordering on the tape. I often have to spend quite a bit of time surgically editing the video and audio together so it is a complete performance. I first listened to this reel back in August of 2024 but couldn't make sense of it. I'm glad I came back to it.

Because of the existence of another recording from late 1949 (The Bloch and Diamond pieces) and the age of the box style of the reel being late 40s black and not the super early 1947/48 style tartan boxes I’m going to go ahead and say this was November 13th, 1949. Here’s the program for that: https://archives.nyphil.org/index.php/artifact/69180a1c-efda-4b9b-8692-fe801985494f-0.1?search-type=singleFilter&search-text=Stokowski+Tchaikovsky&doctype=&sort-order=asc&sort-column=npp%3ASortDate&page=5

If you have other information I’d love to hear it! There does appear to be recordings of this performance on YouTube but it’s only the 2nd movement so perhaps this is a channel exclusive? I also couldn't find any vinyl/shellac recordings of this on dicogs.com - but maybe you know of one?

Unfortunately the quality of the recording is not the best - I spent a lot of time trying to eq and compress/limit the distorted parts with some success. Also unfortunately the first minute or so of the 3rd movement is lost. Other than that the performance is intact!

Technical Info: Unknown Scotch tape, but probably 111 7” reel 7 1/2 IPS

00:00 - Andante – Allegro con anima 13:34 - Andante cantabile, con alcuna licenza 25:59 - Valse. Allegro moderato 31:11 - Finale. Andante maestoso – Allegro vivace – Moderato assai e molto maestoso – Presto