Rosenblatt Respected? The Truth About the New Rosenblatt CDs

The NY Times ran a feature the other day on the latest attempt to update the sound on the old 78 rpm recordings of the great early 20th century Cantor Yossele Rosenblatt for digital release.  The enthusiast behind this venture is one Mendy Werdyger of Brooklyn, proprietor of Aderet Music, who has gathered multiple copies of the fragile 78s and patched together digitally enhanced tracks to give new life to the spectacular old recordings. 

As soon as I read the Times article on-line, I located Werdyger's website and ordered his three Rosenblatt releases, which arrived with astonishing speed in my mailbox.  I've got the first disc playing as I'm writing this.  Right from the start, I was startled by the sound quality that Werdyger has achieved, which puts in the shade all prior CD releases of Rosenblatt material.  The material sounds at times as if it was recorded several decades later than the 1920s provenance of most of the original recordings.  There is a depth and warmth that is missing from all the CD issues I've previously heard, and I've sampled many of those, having conceived a great admiration for this artist from hearing the 78s in my father's collection. 

Anybody who loves Rosenblatt's art should rush to acquire these.  The detailed booklets that come with the discs, full of historic photos, biographical information, and information about the music, are a big plus - much more than one gets with the previous bare-bones productions from other sources.

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I wrote the above in the first throes of enthusiasm, without having read the booklets carefully or sampled the second or third discs.  Having now done so, I have quite a few additional comments.

1.  The first two discs sound to me as if Mr. Werdyger has digitally extracted Rosenblatt's voice and superimposed it on a digitally generated rearrangement of the original instrumental accompaniments.  He has also added echo and rebalanced the voice and instruments from the originals.  The result is synthetic.  An artificially beautiful frame has been created to surround the famous Rosenblatt voice.  Some actual instruments and singers have been introduced, but most of the accompaniment sounds to be electronically generated, including an electronic keyboard.  It is not clear from the booklet who is playing the keyboard -- perhaps arranger Yossi Dayan -- and I can imagine him sitting at the electronic keyboard with headphones on, trying to match the exact tempi and inflections of the original to be in sync with Rosenblatt's voice.  The results vary in their success from track to track.  The recordings taken from acoustic originals, predating the invention of the microphone, sound quite a bit different from the later, electronic originals from the mid-1920s onwards.  The acousticals have a very disembodied vocal sound when superimposed on a bed of modern digital accompaniment.

2.  With the third disc, Mr. Werdyger has evidently graduated to true historic restoration, for these sound like the real thing - carefully cleaned up, filtered, rebalanced original 78s with the original musicians.  In other words, these sound like the 78s I used to hear, or the early LP transfers of Rosenblatt I was able to acquire, but with most of the surface noise suppressed, the quality of the instruments more tightly focused, and the voice much cleaner and present.  These are a real achievement, well worth hearing, not merely "party records," which might be a more accurate description of the first two volumes.

3. Back in the days of LP, I remember the critical uproar when somebody at RCA produced a stunt stereo LP recording of Caruso.  A modern opera orchestra and conductor were hired to record the accompaniments and Caruso's actual voice was patched in for an aria recital that was hyped as modern Caruso in stereo.  Most of the critical comment was unkind, since there was quite an aural disconnect between the quality of the vocal recording (all of Caruso's recordings were made in the acoustic period) and the modern analogue stereo recording of the orchestra.  In addition, the conductor was using a click track to try to match Caruso's tempi, and synchronization was occasionally a little crazy.  Well, that's something like what these Rosenblatt recordings, volumes 1 and 2, sound like - with the difference that RCA's "Caruso in stereo" stunt was a pre-digital product using a real orchestra.  Mr. Werdyger is using mainly electronics to generate his instrumental accompaniments (although he has gotten a handful of men to simulate a real choir), making the result more artificial. 

I would back off from my excited recommendation of the first two volumes.  On the other hand, volume 3 is a very fine artistic achievement.  It sounds to me like a fine digital transfer with careful filtering and sonic enhancement of the original recordings, without any artificial overdubbing of modern instruments or electronics, and I can really applaud it.  Every Rosenblatt enthusiast needs to hear volume 3, which concludes with an extraordinary rarity - a recording of the 20-something Rosenblatt singing in September 1909 in Hamburg with a piano accompaniment on a worn Odeon recording that has come up surprisingly well in this digital transfer, given its vintage.  His voice is fantastic on this early recording, but the singing is very stiff by comparison to the later recordings.

4.  In my original posting, I also raved about the booklets.  My rave was based on looking at the booklet for Volume 1, which really is terrific, with a lengthy bio of the artist, full texts in Hebrew and English for all the songs (including transliteration), and plenty of photos and historical documents reproduced. It does not, however, provide an honest account of how the recordings were produced and the role of digital manipulation involved in blend the original voice with digitally generated accompaniments.  From there it goes downhill, however.  The booklet for volume 2 has a shortened bio, presumably because the buyer will have acquired volume 1, and fewer historical illustrations.  Sadly, since volume 3 is the most recommendable on artistic terms, its booklet will be least useful to anybody not fluent in Hebrew, since there are no English translations for the songs, and almost everything is in Hebrew except the acknowledgements page.  In addition, it appears to me that we are given only the first line in Hebrew of the song texts, followed by what appears to be lengthy commentary about each song in Hebrew.  So volume 3 was evidently not planned for a general audience from outside the orthodox world.  Which is strange, since it is with the release of volume 3 that the NY Times took notice and published a feature article, likely to stimulate purchases from people like me, who have an interest in Rosenblatt but lack the Hebrew fluency to decipher the booklet.

I am a bit put out that the Times writer failed to mention any of the trickery involved in the production of the first two volumes.  Did he listen to them?  Did he have any familiarity with the originals?  Or was this just a random feature writer on assignment who lacked the musical background to tell the difference between a restored 78 rpm recording from the acoustic or early electronic era and a digital facsimile with an old vocal track superimposed on it?  I wonder whether any of the classical record magazines will take note and review these releases?