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The Talich archive.

Article Excerpt
I hope that the Supraphon won't be annoyed at the "borrowing" of this title. Years ago it was the title of three albums, at that time still vinyl records, of re-editions of Vaclav Talich recordings. The first was devoted solely to recordings of Josef Suk, the second concentrated on Czech music, and the third on the world repertoire. In their time they were an extremely valuable and important series for getting to know the field. For many people it was also a first meeting with Talich's much older recordings from the 1920s and 30s, naturally not yet produced by Supraphon but by the London firm and later released under the Electrola and Victor labels. Supraphon is today the main hope that the recordings of the conductor Vaclav Talich will not fall into oblivion, since the archive contains all the recordings that Talich made at a time when recordings had started to reach an acceptable technical level, i.e. at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s.

The ability to technically modify recordings without fundamentally changing their identity, which came with the development of digitalisation and compact disks at the beginning of the 1980s, brought benefits few had anticipated. Those hard to find recordings from the pre-war period started to appear in great quantities in faultlessly cleaned up form and so today it is much easier to get an idea of the interpretations of the period. Major collections of Toscanini, Furtwangler and other conductors came out. Recently the extensive EMI Great Conductors of the 20th Century series has earned special attention, and in it a double album of Talich, although for the most part containing more recent Supraphon recordings. These have in fact mostly already been published by Supraphon separately, especially in what is known as the "postal" edition for the 100th anniversary of the Czech Philharmonic. If, however, we are interested in the period when Talich was principal conductor of the orchestra, i.e. the First Republic and the Occupation, then we should certainly take note of the double album from the Tahra company, which is the first to put the Dvorak Symphonies from the 1930s on compact disc, for example. Nor should we forget the very important production of the Koch Legacy company (RCD), which has had the courage to release the very first Talich recordings of Ma vlast [My Country] (1929) and Slavonic Dances (1935). This introductory survey is meant to indicate that it is now very much high time that Vaclav Talich,...