20 The Compleat Record Man

If there was such an award as the Compleat Record Man, you would certainly be eligible. Performer, researcher, A&R planner, recordist, mixer and editor, publicist, advertising man and now retail contact man—all of these you have done with great flair and enthusiasm.

Biggs, while on a concert trip to Atlanta in 1972, had agreed to do a small errand for Columbia. He probably thought little of it, but it prompted an effusive note of thanks from Pierre Bourdain of the Columbia Masterworks Department, in which the above testimonial appears. Biggs did indeed do all the things Bourdain lists, and in this respect he was virtually alone among recording artists. By 1972 he had been with Columbia for a quarter of a century, and it is evident that he was regarded as “one of the family” by everyone from the top executives to the secretaries and engineers.

And Biggs worked hard for Columbia, which was more and more becoming his major link with his public. Columbia, for its part, relied on Biggs’s taste, judgment, and ability to generate ever fresh and creative ideas. It also trusted Biggs’s instinct for knowing when an idea had had its day—and when it was time to move on to a new one.

In the late 1960s, encouraged by Hellmuth Kolbe and good record sales, Biggs had seemed ready to carry on the Historic Organs series indefinitely, and he even talked half-seriously of such esoterica as “Historic Organs of Yugoslavia.” But after the pronounced success of the East German Bach and Walther albums, there appeared only two further items in that series. One, made up largely of already recorded but unreleased tapes from various tours, was entitled Famous Organs of Holland and North Germany and was released in January 1973. “Famous” replaced “Historic” in the title of this album because Biggs wanted to include a tape made in the 1960s of Jan Koetsier’s delightful Partita for English horn and organ, a modern work recorded on a modern Flentrop organ in Breda. The other album was a Columbia editing-room assemblage of excerpts from previously released recordings with the ungainly title of E. Power Biggs Plays 24 Historic Organs in 8 Countries Covering 7 Centuries of Music by 24 Composers, which was released early in 1972. On its four sides Biggs pulled together some of the best examples of organs and music from a dozen or so older albums, throwing in for good measure a new Bach Toccata and Fugue in D minor recorded in Arlesheim and left over from The Biggs Bach Book sessions.

One projected album would have combined the historic theme with the “window rattlers” in a “Historic Organs of South Germany” recording featuring the “splendid massive sound” of the large Baroque organs in Weingarten, Ottobeuren, and Ochsenhausen. Perhaps because of the notoriously difficult playing actions or the uncertain condition of these instruments, this album never materialized. With new projects beckoning and other record companies capitalizing on the “historic organs” theme, Biggs probably felt that he had made the point that he had stated in an article in the Saturday Review in 1968:

Best of all, recordings (and pictures) give people a clearer sense of the identity of the organ. The musical public has a good appreciation of excellence in orchestral tone and other musical fields. But considering the vast variety of instruments of all shapes, sizes, and tonal aims (not to mention current electronic counterfeits) which claim to be organs, it is no wonder that many music lovers have only the fuzziest idea of what an organ is, or should be, and the way in which it can and should sound.

One is still likely to encounter organists, students, and music lovers who credit Biggs’s recordings, particularly those of historic instruments, with giving them their first glimpse of the identity—and variety—of the organ.

Biggs’s concert schedule was drastically curtailed in 1970. Early in the year he played a concerted program as well as solo recitals in Harrisburg, Curaçao, and the Busch-Reisinger Museum. Fortunately, not much had been scheduled for the fall, for illness struck again in November, forcing Biggs to cancel an appearance with the McGill Chamber Orchestra in Montreal. With characteristic concern, he arranged for Boston Symphony organist Berj Zamkochian to fill in for him.

In 1971 no recording tours were planned, for, as Biggs wrote Kolbe in January, “It may turn out to be a year of consolidation of various things we have in the icebox, and—for me—of building up new repertoire and program ideas (which take time!) for European recording a little later on.” Thus a good portion of the year was spent in editing and planning. The church with four organs had yet to turn up, but in the meantime St. George’s in New York, which had proven ideal for stereo recording, was also about as good a setting for a quad recording as one could find in the United States. The organ itself is divided into three fairly widely spaced segments, and all one needed for the fourth quadrant was a brass band.

Biggs broached the idea of a quadraphonic recording at St. George’s to McClure in one of his “idea lists,” along with a Rheinberger album and another Bach Organ Favorites. He had recorded the Walther Concertos on the pedal harpsichord after his return from Germany and wanted to do further harpsichord work. Other ideas included some large Romantic works on the Music Hall organ in Methuen, where he had not recorded for a number of years, another Americana album (looking ahead to the Bicentennial), and more Bach works with instruments.

The Bach Organ Favorites series, recorded at the Busch-Reisinger Museum, continued popular with the record-buying public. The title of the series, as Biggs noted on the jacket of the fifth album, was self-explanatory:

But how can it be justified through five record albums, with more to come? If all compositions contained therein are favorites, what are the favorites? Well, illogically, all are favorites. Bach’s organ music is so splendid and varied that, in performance, every Bach work asserts its particular charm, and one’s favorite may very well be whatever Bach one happens to be playing at the moment.

Volume 5 of the Bach series was recorded in August 1971, a punishingly hot month. Since the building was not air-conditioned, the heat had caused the organ to go badly out of tune, necessitating a complete retuning. To avoid street noises, the recordings were done late at night, with the windows closed and boarded up for additional sound insulation. Down in the basement, where the recording equipment was, it was relatively comfortable, but the TV monitor disclosed a hard-working Biggs in a sweaty tee shirt in the gallery upstairs, stopping occasionally to mop his brow with the towel slung around his neck, or to listen to a replay of something just taped. Biggs rested and practiced at home during the day, but he was the original night owl and displayed incredible stamina during these sessions, which usually ran for four or five nights. Finally Biggs would turn and announce over the monitor, “I think we have it!” As the engineers and producer shut down their machines and stretched, Peggy produced a bottle of champagne.

With another Favorites album finished, Biggs turned his attention to what he called “the St. Georgy Orgy.” He had recently engaged a publicity agent, Audrey Michaels, “in an effort to get some good publicity stories, on the wave of the Leipzig and Freiberg releases,” he reported to McClure, “but also about all our records and the unique meaning records have for organs and organ music (sounds stuffy, doesn’t it!).” Unfortunately the agent could not understand why Biggs did not want to “rush around playing all possible concerts.” But, “the fact is, as you know, the recording projects take more and more time, and one must make a choice.” Although Biggs greatly disliked talking—or, presumably, even thinking—about it, he was neither as young nor as strong as he once was, and he was finding it necessary to slow down and husband his energies more.

As “live bait for publicity,” Michaels suggested doing a duplicate of the St. Thomas, Leipzig, program at St. Thomas’s Church in New York. Biggs added the idea of a follow-up organ and brass program at St. George’s, where he traditionally played a New Year’s Eve concert anyway. From this the plans for the quadraphonic recording at St. George’s rather quickly ripened, in order to take full advantage of the players and practice required by the concert. Early plans included some standard baroque numbers, but the final program consisted almost entirely of nineteenth- and twentieth-century pieces, some of them arranged from the solo organ repertoire and almost all of them “window rattlers.” Biggs had sensed the initial seismic rumblings of a Romantic revival and intended, as usual, to get there first with the most.

Audrey Michaels did her job well. When Biggs arrived in New York during the holiday season, there were feature articles in several papers on Biggs and his recordings and forthcoming concerts, and the New York Times ran a half-page interview. On December 22 Biggs began his “St. Thomas at St. Thomas” program, only to have it interrupted by a bomb threat. According to producer Andrew Kazdin, who was in the audience, “As they calmly cleared the church, Biggs played on! They had to come to get him in the loft—and he didn’t want to go! Eventually my own nerves got the better of me, and I helped coax him down.” On New Year’s Eve Biggs combined a preview of the quad recording at St. George’s with carol singing and James Hewitt’s Battle of Trenton, with Edward O. Miller, the church’s rector, reading Hewitt’s programmatic descriptions.

As 1972 opened Biggs was still searching for European locations for his proposed Rheinberger and quadraphonic Bach recordings. Columbia again declared March Biggs Month, releasing three all-new albums (Music for Organ, Brass and Percussion, recorded at St. George’s; the Walther Concertos, recorded in Freiberg; and The Magnificent Mr. Handel, Vol. 2) plus the grab-bag, E. Power Biggs Plays 24 Historic Organs . . . , all on March 29, Biggs’s birthday. Bach Organ Favorites, Vol. 5, appeared during the summer.

Spring was taken up largely with concerts, four on the West Coast and a few in the South. In April Biggs gave two recitals on the new Mander organ at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. This instrument, housed in eighteenth-century casework, is located in a historic church building moved from London as a memorial to Winston Churchill. Biggs was also arranging American tours for Hannes Kastner of Leipzig and Hans Otto of Freiberg, in return for their help during his East German recording tour. Illness again interfered with Biggs’s plans in late spring, and in order to catch up on his editing and recording responsibilities he kept his fall schedule clear of concert commitments.

Biggs had made up his mind to record the two Rheinberger Concertos for organ and orchestra, but gave up his initial thoughts of a European site in favor of St. George’s, which could if necessary also serve for the solo Romantic and “Bach in Quad” albums he was planning. But Kolbe now had quad equipment, and thus a European location for the Bach project was still hoped for. An additional Bach record appeared in Biggs’s plans at this time, to consist of concerted movements from cantatas done with positive organ and chamber orchestra. A gimmicky quad recording in which the four voices of a fugue would be recorded separately on the pedal harpsichord and then put together never materialized. Plans for the updated Americana album were being formulated, and Biggs was actively preparing for some of the higher-priority projects. One was Rheinberger; the other Bach. “What I’d like to do this coming summer,” he wrote Tom Frost of Columbia, late in 1972, “is to establish a beachhead in Quadraphonic Bach. . . .”

The Rheinberger Concertos were recorded at St. George’s Church in late November with a good pick-up orchestra directed by Maurice Peress, who had also collaborated on the earlier brass album. The timing was fortuitous, for a month later, the very day after Biggs’s New Year’s Eve concert, St. George’s Church was severely damaged by fire, and the organ was put out of commission for several months.

Early in 1973 Biggs began planning another exploratory excursion to Europe. He also increased his concert activity with spring performances scheduled in Montreal, Washington, and on the new Danish-built Frobenius organ in the First Congregational Church of Cambridge. In March he took part in a bizarre midnight concert at Radio City Music Hall in New York, really a Columbia publicity stunt, billed as “Keyboard Colossus.” It ran two hours without intermission and included everything from one of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos to the Thunder and Lightning Polka of Johann Strauss, Sr., played by ten pianos. At intervals Biggs served up two serious pieces (by Bach and Soler) and two not-so-serious ones (Ives’s Variations on “America” and Hewitt’s Battle of Trenton) on the Music Hall’s “Mighty Wurlitzer,” spiced with appropriate commentary. For the finale he joined the ten pianos, harpsichord, and everything else available in Sousa’s Stars and Stripes Forever while flags waved, lights twinkled, and the ten pianos went slowly around on the revolving stage. “I’ve always felt that Biggs would rather have been somewhere else that night,” Andrew Kazdin later observed, “but like the good trouper he was he carried it off with great charisma and wit.”

In June Biggs, having made inquiries of European friends, went to Europe in search of a quad recording site. In the Cathedral of Freiburg-im-Breisgau (Baden) he found what he was looking for: “There are FOUR independent organs in the Münster,” he reported to Columbia, “each playable at its own console, and all together from a central console. The Quad and Stereo possibilities are absolutely unique!” Biggs had already chosen four big Toccatas and Fugues (“In all these Toccatas, the antiphonal phrases can ‘run all around the church’ quite logically”) and was all set to book the Cathedral for a fall recording session.

Rehearsing with the orchestra, St. George’s Church, 1972. Photo by Edward O. Miller, Jr.

Biggs was still planning more Bach and Handel on the pedal harpsichord, but a chance suggestion from a friend led to a very different sort of album. The great ragtime composer Scott Joplin had caught the public fancy, and his music was being played by everything from synthesizers to brass bands. Why not Joplin on the pedal harpsichord? Why not indeed, responded Columbia. “I think the Ragtimes would be a fun record,” said Biggs, who, with his usual industry, began researching and arranging a program, which he recorded at the Columbia studio early in August.

A few weeks later, in September 1973, Biggs wrote to Kazdin, “Joplin is a forgotten dream, and now I’m full of Freiburg!” With Kazdin and Peggy, he met Kolbe there at the end of the month and got right to work. Recording four widely separated organs in a mammoth reverberant building raised problems not anticipated by Biggs, whose only other quad experience had been in the much smaller St. George’s Church. In the Freiburg Cathedral there is a Marcussen organ high on the north wall of the nave in a Gothic “swallow’s nest” position. Located almost exactly between two Rieger organs (in the choir and at the left of the crossing) and a Spaeth organ in the west end gallery, it was a crucial link in the overall quadraphonic picture. While all four organs have their own consoles, they may also be played simultaneously from a central console, but Biggs discovered that the critical nave (Marcussen) organ could only be played from the bottom manual of the central console, which also controlled one of the front organs. This prohibited the two from being played separately in any overlapping situation and threatened the full realization of some of Biggs’s quad effects. His old friend Josef von Glatter-Götz of the Rieger firm came to the rescue by rewiring the nave organ to the third manual. On his return, Biggs wrote to him,

I’ve never played a quartet of organs before! Balancing, and so on, introduced many problems, and I suppose we took two or three times as long as normal for the recording. “Marcussen on the third manual” made many interweaving antiphonal effects possible. In fact, without this the project would not have been possible.

Biggs recorded sufficient material for two albums at this session, one of which, his “Bach beachhead,” was released exactly a year later. The second, released two years later, in August 1975, was the quad showpiece the hi-fi enthusiasts had been waiting for, a rather hoked-up mélange of familiar Baroque transcriptions, mostly by Handel and Purcell, which played all manner of tricks with four speakers and was effective even in stereo. “‘Proclamation’ was the idea,” stated Biggs in the jacket notes.

The Rheinberger album was released shortly after Biggs’s return from Freiburg, in August 1973. In a full-page review in The Diapason, Robert Schuneman hailed it as a sign that the Romantic revival was “more than surface deep,” praised the balance, but criticized the uncharacteristic brilliance of St. George’s “American classic” organ. The review by Vernon Gotwals in Music was briefer but even more enthusiastic: “BUY this record; BUY it!!” he exhorted his readers. But he too felt that the Möller organ was not “Romantic” enough in tone-color to do full justice to the music; perhaps that is why the idea of recording a solo album of Romantic works at St. George’s was never realized.

Two months later the very different Joplin record appeared in the stores. Reviewers generally put it in the category of an aural coffee-table book—a well-produced “party record.” FM Guide for April 1974 subjected it to a careful comparison with other Joplin releases, and while admitting that it might lack something in authenticity, praised the “vitality and rhythmic sassiness” of Biggs’s interpretations. Columbia pushed the Joplin and Rheinberger issues, plus the earlier Leipzig Bach release, in their pre-Christmas advertising: “From Rags to Rheinberger and Bach again!” In the summer of 1974 Biggs recorded a second album of Joplin rags; this time he thought up his own tongue-in-cheek publicity hype: “After 25 years with Columbia Records, E. Power Biggs is in Rags!” Many of his organist colleagues liked the Joplin rags well enough to want Biggs’s arrangements of them, and eventually two sets were published, by G. Schirmer and by Hansen.

Biggs, unlike most other recording artists, always took a major part in the editing of his own tapes. Andrew Kazdin, his last producer, wrote in 1983, “You must understand that NONE of Biggs’s personal involvement in the editing process was asked of him by anyone at Columbia Records. He just liked to do it himself.” When a minor illness forced Biggs to leave before finishing a splicing task with engineer Ed Michalski, he very apologetically asked Kazdin to complete the job—which, Kazdin noted, was really the producer’s duty anyway. Editing was not the only “gift” Biggs routinely bestowed on Columbia, and so Kazdin also became his self-appointed watchdog, to prevent Biggs from overextending himself on the company’s behalf. He discovered that Biggs was using his own funds (including royalty checks) to pay for record release flyers and advertisements in the organ journals. “I tried to sniff out these cases,” recalled Kazdin, “and get the appropriate party at Columbia to take over Biggs’s (well thought out) plan and, of course, intercept the bill just in time to pay it.”

Autographing records in the Harvard Coop, 1975. Photo by Jet Commercial Photographers.

Few who listen to the finished product have any conception of the amount of work that goes on between the capturing of the final cadence of a piece of music on tape and the pressing of the completed record. Andrew Kazdin has summarized what normally occurs—“in the vast majority of cases”:

After the recording sessions, the producer would gather all the original tapes together and start a careful listening process. During this period, all sorts of minute details can be found. Slight errors of performance which went undetected in the recording session can be noted and, hopefully, slated to be replaced by healthier counterparts. When the many hours of listening are completed, the producer’s score is marked with an exact splicing plan—a roadmap which shows precisely how to construct the final edited tape so that it will contain the best and cleanest performance of which the artist is capable.

Next, the producer takes this plan into an editing room—usually at Columbia Records and usually manned by an engineer familiar with the niceties of “Classical” Music. Here many days of painstaking splicing can ensue. The splicing plan contained in the producer’s score is now turned into reality. The final result is a tape which exhibits the sought-after performance. Then the third step takes place. The spliced tape very often consists of more than 2 tracks and so the producer must then go about the job of mixing the spliced, multi-track tape into the final 2-track master which will be the one used to generate the records themselves.

That Kazdin explains, is what the post-production task usually consists of, but, “NOT WITH BIGGS!”

I don’t know when his unique working method became adopted because it was in full swing when I began my association with him. The first part of his system is occasionally shared by other recording artists. At the time of the sessions (or sometime just afterward) an extra tape is made of all the “takes” that were recorded. Biggs would take this tape home . . . and do all the listening and choosing himself. As I said, some artists prefer to make up the written splicing plan themselves.

However, this is where the similarity ends. After the plan was written into the score, Biggs would then actually splice together his copy-tapes just to see if the plan would work. Naturally, this tape was not actually used to make the record. It became merely a prototype to verify the plan itself.

Then, as if the previous involvement were not enough, Biggs would come to New York (very often, I believe, at his own expense) and go to work in Columbia’s editing rooms—usually with an engineer called Ed Michalski—and supervise the splicing of the original tapes to conform to his prototype. Finally, he would turn over this spliced tape to his producer who would do whatever mixing was necessary.

In August 1973 Andrew Kazdin received some tapes of Biggs’s “home work” and surmised from them that Biggs’s equipment was not in the best of condition. Well aware of the many favors Biggs continually did for Columbia, he saw an opportunity for Columbia to do one in return. Kazdin learned that it had indeed been some time since Biggs’s machines had received even routine maintenance. In an interoffice memo he cited the “enormous amount of work which [Biggs] does using this equipment for the benefit of the Masterworks Department” and requested that one of Columbia’s technicians be sent to Cambridge at company expense to service it. “It would be a very nice gesture on our part and would, in a sense, partially express our appreciation and gratitude for the ‘extracurricular’ work which Mr. Biggs constantly performs for the benefit of his product.”

Biggs’s veteran Ampexes apparently gave the Columbia technicians more trouble than they anticipated, and some of the problems eluded them until late September. Biggs, meanwhile, had invested in a pair of new Sony machines, so that when the two Ampex machines finally did get put back in good order, he was able to edit in quad as well as in stereo.

By December Biggs was well into his editing chores again. In that month he sent Columbia a “What’s Next” list in which he outlined work in progress:

As if editing, advertising, and sending out his own flyers were not enough, Biggs was also willing to pitch in with public relations jobs for Columbia. In the summer of 1974 Biggs and Peggy attended a company convention in Los Angeles by express invitation from Columbia’s president, Goddard Lieberson. Afterward Biggs thanked Lieberson for his “most generous introduction at the Saturday festivities,” and Pierre Bourdain thanked Biggs for upholding the honor of the Columbia Masterworks Department: “Your participation lent a note of elegance and musical authority to what would otherwise have been dominated by decibels and primitive rhythms.”

Biggs still bent his literary talents to his work as well. Not only did he continue to write jacket notes, but his research into his subject matter often resulted in interesting articles for the trade magazines. The European tours, the historic organs, the glass armonica, the pedal harpsichord, the Handel recordings, Leipzig—all became subjects for his concise and pithy writings. Typical are the articles on Rheinberger that appeared in The Tracker and Music in 1973 and 1974 respectively. Biggs went straight to the source for his historical information and graphics: Rheinberger’s birthplace in Vaduz, Liechtenstein. Along with his profuse thanks to the Vaduz authorities for their aid, he sent copies of the Rheinberger recording as soon as it was pressed. Biggs was habitually generous with copies of his albums, which he had to procure at his own expense. All individuals in any way connected with a recording always received a copy, from the proprietor of a Freiburg hotel where Biggs had stayed during a recording session to reviewers, concert hosts, friends, and even an occasional fan (often a young one) who had written a particularly sincere letter.

While some recording artists do take a certain amount of interest in the editing and marketing processes, and a few like to write their own jacket notes, many more record with a fundamentally “take it or leave it” attitude and show little interest between the completion of the recording session and the issuance of their album. But Biggs, “the Compleat Record Man,” found all aspects of the recording and producing process genuinely interesting. He saw the phonograph record as a complex art form, no part of which could be neglected if the result was to have excellence. When a reviewer criticized a “smudgy” spot on a recording, Biggs took this remark as an affront not to his playing but to his editing.

Yet when a record was done, it was done. When a copy of the finished release arrived from Columbia, Biggs usually played it once, to make certain that everything was as he expected it to be. He would already be immersed in another project that demanded all his attention. As with any art form, some records were bound to be better than others, but Biggs could be satisfied that he had done all that was humanly possible to realize the maximum potential of each one.