Luogo e data di registrazione		Casino Baumgarten, Linzer Strasse, Vienna (Austria) - 1950
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Executive producer		Matouš Vlčinský
	Sounf engineer		Karl Wolleitner
	Prima Edizione LP		Supraphon | 23291/23302 - (12 dischi, 24 facciate, 78 rpm) | durata 108' 05" | (p) 1953 | Mono
	Edizione CD		ORF "Alte Musik | CD 379 | 1 CD - durata 48' 43" | (p) & (c) 2004 | AAD Mono | BWV 1048, 1049 & 1051 Supraphon | SU 4213-2 | 2 CDs - durata 48' 41" - 59' 27" | (p) 1953 (c) 2016 | AAD Mono | BWV 1046-1051
	Original Cover		-
	Note		The First recording with period instruments. Special thanks to Alice Harnoncourt, Ingomar Rainer and Robert Wolf for the information on the recording and the members of the esnsemble.

On Josef Mertin's recordings of the Brandenburg Concertos (CDs Supraphon SU 4213-2) When, in 1950, post-war Europe, whose political and cultural scene had been mercilessly divided by the Iron Curtain, was commemorating the 200th anniversary of the death of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), the festivities were borne in the spirit of numerous symbolic connotations. They were aimed at re-embracing the most valuable assets of conflict-debased German art, as well as celebrating Bach’s universally comprehensible musical language. The festivities were particularly vigorous in war-ravaged, divided Germany and neighbouring Austria, whose music centres of Salzburg and Vienna saw the Bach anniversary as am opportunity to hold numerous commemorative events and concerts. The Bach jubilee was not overlooked by the Czechoslovak music publisher Supraphon, which duly implemented a project that would have no parallel in the country in the years to follow. Making the best of the composer’s anniversary, the company utilised the repertoire in the record catalogue, the post-war availability of fledgling Viennese artists and its contacts with the musical circles in the Austrian capital. In the 1950s. Supraphon produced a host of remarkable recordings, primarily featuring core Czech 19th- and 20th-century music, with many of them catching the attention of critics and discerning listeners abroad. From the late 1950s, Supraphon’s success was increased in part owing to the engagement of renowned foreign conductors and instrumentalists, including those hailing from beyond the Eastern bloc (John Barbirolli, Jean Fournet, Antonio Pedrotti, and others). Nevertheless, at the time, none of the state publisher’s projects came into being outside the country, and without the participation of Czechoslovak artists, as had been the case of the recording of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, BWV 1046-1051 (1718-1721), made in Vienna in 1950. The history of the album started in the heart of the Broumov Promontory in the northeast of Bohemia by the Czech-Polish (until 1945, Czech-German) border. In March 1904, Josef Mertin (b. 21.3.1904 Broumov, d. 16.2.1998 Vienna) was born into a German family living next to the Benedictine Monastery. Following his graduation from the local grammar school, where he had received thorough training in singing, the violin, piano and organ, and a brief spell as a music teacher in his remote native town (1922-1925), in 1925 he received a scholarship from the company Benedikt Schroll’s Sohn and moved to Vienna in order to study voice and sacred music at the Wiener Musikakademie. While in the Austrian capital, in 1927 and 1928 he formed a chamber orchestra and passed exams in church music and pedagogy, and in 1928 he graduated as Kapellmeister from the Neues Wiener Konservatorium. Mertin concurrently attended musicology seminars at the Universität Wien. In 1928, at the age of 24, he made his debut with the Wiener Kammerorchestervereinigung; from 1932 he conducted Hans Gál’s Madrigalchor (1890-1987); and in 1933 he founded his own instrumental ensemble, Collegium musicum Wiener Musikakademie. At the end ofthe 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, in addition to new contemporary music and Bach pieces (the Saint Matthew Passion, on period instruments), Mertin also performed compositions by Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300-1377), whose moderntiine premieres in Vienna caused quite a stir, as well as by his beloved Heinrich Schütz. He taught at the Kapellmeisterschule and the Neues Wiener Konservatorium (1928-1938), the Wiener Volskhochschule (1932-1938), and at the Musikakademie (1937-1938). In 1950 he left the Konservatorium der Stadt Wien so as to continue teaching at the Musikakademie (1946-1978) and organ restoring (from 1931 he worked at the Federal Monuments Office), to carry out research into the building of historical musical instruments and put together a collection of early instruments at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Evidently the most intriguing of his activities were Mertin’s experimental early music performances at the Hofburgkapelle and the Albertina gallery (from 1934, he held his own concert series at the Festsaal der Graphischen Sammlung der Albertina). His achievements in the domains of music, education, organisation. restoration and collecting earned him the title of Professor, the Cross of Honour for Science and Art (1960), the Gold Medal of Merit for the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna (1989), and the Silver Medal of Merit of the Republic of Austria (1994). Before Josef Mertin died at the age of 93, he could not only look back fondly at his long life filled with music and pioneering work focused on its early stylistic periods, he was also able to observe with pride the progress of his numerous pupils (Claudio Abbado, Mariss Jansons, Zubin Mehta, and others), many of whom had been enticed by his unconventional teaching methods and imbued with a passionate ardour for early music. The New Testament’s "For many are called, but few are chosen" (Matthew 22:14) also applied to Mertin’s students, the majority of whom could only put up with his not overly systematic educational methods for a few lessons. Yet those who did remain faithful to Mertin’s apostolic verve and rccondite pedagogic techniques embraced performance of early music on period instruments and copies in the post-war decades so fiercely that they almost condemned their teacher's name to becoming a mere encyclopaedia entry. The most gifted of Mertin’s pupils in the late 1940s included the Austrian violinist Eduard Melkus (b. 1.9.1928 in Baden an Wien), who in 1946 assumed the post of concert master of Mertin’s Collegium musicum and served his teacher as a faithful and practical guide through the vieissitudes of the music scene in Vienna (from 1951 to 1953, he studied in Switzerland with the Vienna-born violinist of Czech origin Petr Rybář, a friend of Bohuslav Martinů). Melkus also followed in Mertin’s footsteps by founding early-music ensembles, Schola antiqua Wien (1952) and Capella academica Wien (1965), and finally, as a professor of the violin, viola, Baroque violin and historically informed early-music performance at the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien (1958-1996). When in the autumn of 1950, following years spent at the Schola cantoruin basiliensis in Basel (1947-1950), the gifted Dutch organist and harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt (1928-2012) arrived in Vienna to study musicology, he immediately joined Mertin’s early-music seminar attended by a number of antagonistic talents. Mertin’s students also included the gifted recorder player Elisabeth-Liesel Schaeftlein (1927-1993), a Graz native and sister of Jürg Schaeftlein (1929-1986), the legendary oboist of Concentus musicus Wien (1953). Probably in 1948, she introduced to Mertin and his disciple Melkus her gangly compatriot Nikolaus Harnoncourt (1929-2016), who from 1948 studied the cello with Emanuel Brabec at the Musikakademie. Had Elisabeth-Liesel Schaeftlein not done so, the young Harnoncourt would most likely have pursued the path of a solo instrumentalist, or “just” a player of the Wiener Philharmoniker, performing Dvořák’s and Strauss’s music, instead of becoming one of the major figures of historically informed early music performance of the second half of the 20th century. Had it not been for Elisabeth-Liesel Schaeftlein, in 1950 Mertin’s student team, extended for the sake of the imminent recording of the Brandenburg Concertos with a group of players of the Kammerorchester of the Wiener Konzerthausgesellschaft, who for its time and in comparison with other Viennese orchestras had an unusually high proportion of female members, would have had to do without the cellist Harnoncourt. The talented recorder student Elisabeth-Liesel Schaeftlein, the rising violin star Eduard Melkus, the hitherto unknown cellist Nikolaus Harnoncourt and the subtle Gustav Leonhardt, in the company of members of the Wiener Kammerorchester (l 946), got together in the studio to make under the guidance of Melkus a groundbreaking album of the Brandenburg Concertos. The project had been preceded by the complete recordings made by Alfred Cortot (1932, Orchestre de l’Ecole Normale de Musique) and Adolf Busch (1936, Adolf Busch Chamber Players), as well as accounts of individual pieces, including, for instance, Wilhelm Furtwängler’s live recordings of Brandenburg Concertos Nos. 3 and 5 with the Wiener Philharrnoniker at the Salzburger Festspiele in 1950. Yet, some two centuries after Bach’s death, Josef Mertin decided to take a revolutionary step and perform the flagship work - a "showcase of the composer's instrumental mastery" (N. Harnoncourt) - in a chamber formation, making use of the instruments and applying the performance canon of Bach’s own time. "within the Baroque concerto genre, the concertos represent an ultimate apex; with regard to the instrumentation, they are true chamber music, unveiling their value in the more intimate milieu in which they were formerly performed too. Your gramophone recording (with its most natural use being for personal listening in a private circle) thus complies with the essential trait of this music," Mertin wrote to Supraphon after listening to the recordings that were being completed. A number of the period instmments employed in Mertin`s recording of the Brandenburg Concertos were from his own collection, which was also made use of by the members of the Wiener Gamben-Quartett (1949): Melkus, Harnoncourt, Alfred Altenburger (1927-2015) and Alice Hoffelner (b. 26.9.1930), who would marry Harnoncourt in 1953. Instruments from the collection were also used by Gustav Leonhardt, who in Mertin’s recording of the Brandenburg Concertos played the viola da gamba (Brandenburg Concerto No. 6 in B flat major). By the way, the collection and an organ built by Mertin himself (organo di legno) were indispensable in the making of the generally better-known 1954 radio recording by Paul Hindemith of Claudio Monteverdi’s opera L'Orfeo, performed by Melkus and the oldest generation of the then not yet named historical instruments ensemble Concentus musicus Wien, helmed by Harnoncourt. In addition to the minimalist configuration, made up of students of Mertin’s early music performance class and the members of die Wiener Kammerorchester, headed by the concert master Edith Steinbauer (1901-1996) and the cellist Frieda Litschauer-Krause (1903-1992), the wife of the orchestra’s founder, another natural facet of the pioneering 1950 recording was the adherence to the original instrumental structure of Bach`s Kothen orchestra, including two recorders in the fourth concerto, which up until the 1970s were commonly replaced with traverse flutes. Specific information about the instruments played in the individual Brandenburg Concertos has not been preserved, nor has the date on which the album was made. Yet Mertin’s studio recording is more than a mere sonic document of a revolutionary moment in the history of performing early music on modern and period instruments. Compared to the later projects of Viennese provenience - Jascha Horenstein’s, implemented in September 1954, using historical instruments (performed by Nikolaus Harnoncourt and members of Concentus musicus Wien), and the 1957 recording of Felix Prohaska conducting the members of the Kammerorehester der Wiener Staatsoper - Mertin’s account stands out owing to his endeavour for the utmost sonic transparency and precise leading of the instrument parts. Mertin also gave great thought to the tempos. Even though Horenstein opted for markedly faster tempos. Mertin’s account is strikingly akin to the first of the series of Harnoncourt’s recordings of the Brandenburg Concertos (1964, 1981/1983, 1982). Mertin’s dismissive attitude to the romanticising conception of Bach’s orchestral concertos is boldly audible in comparison with Furtwängler’s 1950 album: Whereas Furtwängler himself played the piano on Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 in D major (29:23), Mertin invited to perform on the harpsichord the technically superlative Bruno Seidlhofer (1905-1982) (22:38). Furtwängler turned Bach’s work into a Classicist-Romantic piano concerto, while Mertin returned to the dialogical character of the Baroque concerto. "]osef Mertin was the father of all the endeavours to purge Romantic and Baroque music of romantic deposits and comfortable tradition," the conductor Milan Turković, bassoonist of Concentus musicus Wien, wrote years later. And bearing cogent witness to this is even the oldest of Mertin’s (precious few preserved) studio recordings, surprisingly made by the Czechoslovak label Supraphon. For the first time since its lirst release, on 12 shellac discs, in 1953, Mertin’s complete account (to whose final recording the (self-) critical Mertin took exception and, following the recording’s completion, he even offered to make for Supraphon new recordings, this time only with Collegium musicum) is now being presented to listeners on CD (in 2004, the year marking the centenary of Josef Mertin’s birth and the 75th birthday of Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Austria’s ORF radio station released a selection of the Brandenburg Concertos Nos. 3, 4 and 6). Thus, after an interval of 66 years, music lovers are offered Mertin’s historically first recording of the Brandenburg Concertos in their entirety, as performed by his ensemble on modern and period instruments. The project serves to pay tribute to Mertin's visionary approach and express admiration for his followers, headed by Nikolaus Harnoncourt. The present unique album is also a proud reminder of their Czech connections. Martin Jemelka Translation: Hilda Hearne Major birthdays are often very welcome affairs. In this case, they provide a suitable occasion to celebrate two anniversaries, Josef Mertin's 100th and Nikolaus Harnoncourt 75th, whose first gramophone recording appears on the present edition. Of course I realise theat Josef Mertin (one of the most modest peole I have known) would not have considered this a real reason to re-issue an historic recording, least of all one of his own. Maybe his description of the circumstances of this 1950 recording as a "scating over thin ice" is somewhat exaggerated, yet it does represent a memorable step in the early music revival. It was prompted by a search for musical authenticity in the 1950 Bach year. Matters that seem self-evident to us today, such as the use of recorders in the 4th concerto (until the 1970's the use of flutes was still customary), the two viola da ganbas in the 6th or the chamber.music scoring of Bach's "Six Concerts Avec plusieurs Instruments" were real pioneer events in 1950. The appearance of Eduard Melkus and of Gustav Leonhardt, who taught harpsichord in the 50's at the Vienna Music Academy, as gambist in the 6th concerto only add to the artistic value of the production. As with the restoration of historic instruments, greatest care was taken with the production of this re-issue. The goal was not to reproduce the original sound (almost impossible anyway) but, in favour of a wider sound spectrum, to document the condition of the original shellac discs in 2004. Sound filters were threfore used only seldom and then extremely sparingly, and it was decided not to put movements together (akthough this would have been quite possible) which had been split up due to the limited playing time of the discs. I hope that this recording from a time far.removed from ours may not only remind us that musical interpretations should always be heard and judged in the context of their times, but far more serve to commemorate a full-blooded musician who, until late in life, tirelessly trained and influenced several generations of students (including myself), a "homo faber" archetype who contributedvsignificantly to the burgeoning of early music, a warm-hearted, caring, modest and very humane person, Josef Mertin!   Althofen, December 6th, 2004 Bernhard Trebuch

On Josef Mertin's recordings of the Brandenburg Concertos (CD ORF 379) This edition consists of a transfer onto CD of 12 shellac 78 rpm discs made by Supraphon in Prague containing three of six Brandenburg concertos by Johann Sebastian Bach. The label on the discs attributes the recording to "Members of the Chamber Orchestra of Vienna" conducted by Josef Mertin and recorded in 1950. A few explanations, amendments and corrections are required concerning both the time and circumstances of the recording and also those taking part. The early music and authentic sound movement in Austria in the twentieth century is closely bound up with the name of Josef Mertin (1904-1998) who, until the sixties and seventies, was considered one of its most important instigators and mentors. Born in Braunau in Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic), Mertin arrived in Vienna in the twenties to study music. He completed his studies within a very short period (1925-28) with diplomas in church music, voice and conducting from the then State Academy and the so-called New Conservatory. In addition, he attended lectures on musicology given by Guido Adler and Rudolf von Ficker at the university. His experience of Ficker's combination of scholarship and musical practice, togheter with the knowledge and skill he soon acquired in instrument-making, did much to mark Mertin's later work as musician, teacher and maker. Numerous concerts and church music activities during the thirties in the field of youth music-making and organ playing (with the associated rediscovery pf pre-Bach music which saw the beginning of Mertin's lifelong dedication to Heinrich Schütz) were interspersed with the first occasional attempts to use historic instruments. This was to be continued after the war at the Collegium musicum of the Vienna Music Academy, where Mertin confronted an international body og highly-qualified students with questions concernin the interpretation of early music, inspiring them to their own exploration, as he liked to call it, which was to spread his exemplary impetus throughout the world. These recordings date from this period shortly after the war. An (unfortunately undated) copy of a letter (Mertin-Archiv, Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Wien) from the professor to the "management of the Supraphon Record Company, Prague" provides valuable documentation about the circumstances as well as Mertin's own particular views of the recording, a "personal statement and assessment of the recentlz-completed recording of Bachßs Brandenburg concertos". Mertin assumes that the necessarily "different nature", even "apparent lack of uniformity" in the sound  world of each pieces is inherent to their differing instrumentation and design (he discusses only concertos III, IV and VI which he apparently received as test pressings) and thus found the very different sounds of the individual recordings acceptable. However there were other serious problems, also concerning the editing and other technical aspects of the recording, about which Mertin did notwithhold his criticism: "The test tape... sounded much more faithful than the finisched disc. In my opinion some important elements in the sound have disappeared in the cutting (Frequency range relationships and balance altered)." The producer was Mertin's friend and colleague Karl Wolleitner (1919-2004) working, according to our research, in the so-called "Casino Baumgarten" on the Linzer Strasse in Vienna's Penzing district. The processing of the material however took place entirely at the Prague factory. The criticism continue in concrete detail: "The 3rd concerto has the most satisfactory 'sound', since the performers all belong to a group used to playing together and the concerto iteself presents the least problems in terms of sound. As a recording it is a technical success, since the composition's design can be clearly heard. The concerto has only one dynamic distorsion... the violins are unreasonably favoured by their closer position to the microphone. The record is good." "Recorders are added to the strings in the 4th concerto. These are real historic instruments, and on top of that, in the hands of wind players with particular stylistic experience. This puts the quasi-modern string sound at a disadvantage, lending it an unflatteringly penetrating quality." However, all in all the recording is "well-worth listening to, and of a higher quality than other records of this piece up till now." Matters start to worsen with the assessment of the final concerto, apparently recorded in winter (February 1950?): "The recording [of Concerto VI Ed.] suffered from the heasting failure and contains more faulty notes than acceptable even under the circumstances." (sic!) In this context, Mertin addresses a foundamental problem and handicap to the whole production: "The Wiener Kammerorchester' was booked for the recording... this orchestra is not an ensemble specialised in early music, although highly-regarded in Vienna and working with care and devotion. The orchestra semply plays in the same standard and exemplary way as the Philharmonic etc. are used to playing. But they are not early music 'specialiss', and as a result certain stulistic wishes cannot be fulfilled with this ensemble. The 6th concerto suffers particularly in this respect... with these players... a new recording would probably not produce significantly better results." A possible alternative was offered: "With my Collegium musicusm as the Vienna State Academy (where the recorders come from!) I have built up an ensemble that plays on actual historic instruments." String instruments restored to their original form are meant here, subsequently referred to as "short-necked violins", which proved more suitable to the demands, since "a whole host of problems which otherwise hinder the performance of early music disappear with the use of instruments in their original state." This stylistic approach of the whole performance is very reminiscent today of Paul Hindemithìs surviving recordings of his own works such as the Concerto for Orchestra op.38 and similar pieces fron the same period. Mertin's Bach interpretations also owe something to the neo-baroque and new objectivity in the result of his effort to cleanse and de-romanticise Bach, to reveal the compositional steucture. Indeed Hindemith and Mertin worked closely together on the 1954 Vienna performance of Monteverdi's "Orfeo" which so impressed the young Harnoncourt and for which Mertin provided a specially-made "organo di legno". Meanwhile, the stimulos and occasions to become involved with so-called period instruments in Vienna came most of all from Othmar Steinbauer (1895-1962), himself a violin student of Sevcik who, rejecting the excessive, highly-individual romantic string sound as understood by the Hauer circle, preferred "old" instruments (even including the pseudo-Middle Age vielle newly-designed from iconographic models but with modern tuning in fifrhs). The Vienna Gamba Quartet also made its mark in this field of activity during the 1950 Bach year with a sensational arrangement of the Art of Fugue (including a completion of the closing fugue by Eduard Melkus which remains exemplary today). Its four members, Alfred Altenburger, Alice Hoffelner, Eduard Melkus and Nikolaus Harnoncourt, who were all closey associated with Mertin's Collegium, played on adapted viola d'amore instruments tuned in fifths, with the bass gamba being the only instrument we would consider historic today. All this led to the suggestion in a letter for a re-recording of the sixth concerto with "new soloist: 1a viola: my best pupil at the Academy with an original Quinton, 2nd viola: Prof. Steimbauer on an original old Viennese master viola; both instruments played with historic viol bows! 1st gamba, ny best Academy gamba-player on an original instrument using historic bowing style. 2nd gamba: ditto: also an outstanding pupil." Further names included the cellist Frieda Krause-Litschauer, Bruno Seidlhofer on the harpsichord and an unnamed double-bass player from the Philharmonic, also with an original instrument. Mertin requested that the additional recording sessions be organised quickly: "The students with whom I could make this  stylistically faithful recording have already graduated and are only available until May." He mentions that one has got a job in a "top-rank Swiss orchestra... one gentleman is going back to France, another to Holland". This sets definite time limits as well as giving some indications about the partecipants in the recording. Nikolaus Harnoncourt was among them, wherther on the gamba as mentioned above or wherther on the cello instead of Frieda Litschauer is no longer certain, as was Gustav Leonhardt, an excellent gamba-player in addition to being a performer on historic keyboard instruments. He had made his Vienna debut in 1950 as harpsichordist and taught at the Music academy from 1952 before taking up his position at the Amsterdam conservatory in 1954. No doubt he was the gentleman referred to in Mertinìs letter who must return to Holland. In the same year Eduard Melkus ("my best pupil at the Academy" almost certainly refers to "the baroquest violinist" according to Hindemith's famous dictum) took up a solo viola position in the Zurich Tonhalle orchestra, the "top-rank Swiss orchestra" mentioned above. Thus the earliest recording date for the 6th concerto was to be in the spring of 1954, and it includes the "youthful work" of a few players who were later to become some of the best performers on the scene! We may now reconstruct the definitive list of those taking part as follows: Edith Steinbauer (1901-1996), leader as well as soloist in no. 4 and second viola in no.6. Eduard Melkus, viola, also as soloist in no. 6. Nikolaus Harnoncourt possibly as cellist in no. 6, but perhaps on one of the gambas. (That Harnoncourt and very probably also his future wife, Alice Hoffelner, were members of the orchestra can also be confirmed by the listing of the complete recording as quasi opus 1 in his official discography.) The stylistically expert recorder players in the 4th concerto were brother and sister Jürg (1929-1986) and Elisabeth (1930-1993) Schaeftlein, the former soon to become a long-serving member and leading light of Concentus Musicus Wien as baroque oboist. It goes without saying that the recorders they used also had nothing in common with authentic instruments in the strictest sense. Finally, Bruno Seidlhofer (1905-1982), later a renowned piano teacher, is listed as playing harpsicord continuo. "The ensemble mentioned here would also have been better for the remaining 5th concerto..." During conversations in later years Mertin candidly described a recording of the 5th Brandenburg (with Bruno Seidlhofer as soloist), clearly made at the same time, as "entirely unusuable"; it never gor beyond the test pressing, which is also why we have chosen to ignore it in the context of this re-issue. Apparently Hindemith attempted to direct a recording of the second concerto with the same team (with Helmut Wonisch playing trumpet alongside Elisabeth Schaeftlein on the recorder). A recording of the first concerto never seems to have been attempted. In an introductory text to a production of all six concertos (and thus not directly for this edition) containing much other useful information Josef Mertin also expresses an interesting thought about his own, carefully considered relationship to the recording medium: "The concertos represent an absolute pinnacle of achievement in the genre of the baroque concerto; their instrumentation in like true chamber music, whose value is best revealed in intimate surroundings such as those in which they were forst performed. Hnece their appearance on record (assuming the most natural use of the record for personal purposes in intimate surroundings) corresponds to an important characteristic of  this music." May this commemorative re-issue of his production of the Brandenburg concertos be granted a suitable affectionate treatment "for personal purposes in intimate surroundings"! Ingomar Raine