BRITISH ORCHESTRAL MUSIC CONDUCTED BY THE COMPOSERS
AND RECORDED IN THE 1920s
Gustav HOLST Beni Mora
- LSO/composer
Frank BRIDGE Suite: The Sea -
LSO/composer
Arthur BLISS Conversations -
SO/composer
Ralph VAUGHAN WILLIAMS The Wasps Overture
- Aeolian Orch/composer
Hamilton HARTY With the Wild Geese - Hallé
/composer
Ethel SMYTH The Wreckers overture - British
SO/composer
mono Recorded: Holst (14 Feb 1924), Bridge (26 July 1923), Bliss (9 Feb 1923),
Vaughan Williams (1922), Harty (26 Mar 1926), Smyth (1 May 1930).
SYMPOSIUM 1202
[75.05]
Web site
symposium@cwcom.net
Symposium's authentic transfer process is difficult to appraise without hearing
the originals but the impression garnered is of minimal processing. These
recordings are getting on for eighty years old. We must not therefore be
surprised at the sizzle and low level pop. In general pitch is healthy and
stable. I did not notice any wow. True enough the sound in Beni Mora is
attenuated and starved. However against that it is a privilege to hear Holst
exploring every nuance of this colourful score replete with references to
The Planets and In the Street of Ouled Nails to Sibelius's
Nightride and Sunrise.
Bridge's The Sea is done with every drop of imaginative insight. I
have never heard the Moonlight movement performed with such slow
enchantment. Neither Handley (Chandos) nor Groves (EMI) can approach this.
This work left Britten thunderstruck and its influence strikes forward abridging
the years to Peter Grimes. In The Storm Bridge is not fluently
served by his orchestra which seems clumsy by comparison with the slow spindrift
of Moonlight.
The Bliss is the only work on the disc to have been recorded at broadly the
same time as its premiere. The Committee Meeting always struck me
as a rather Hungarian affair (Bartók rather than Kodaly) and this
continues into In the ballroom (nothing of Ronald Binge or Geoffrey
Toye in this!). While In the Wood and Soliloquy (the latter
for solo clarinet) are soporific with, in the case of In The Wood,
the first rustlings of the romance that was to distinguish the slow movement
of the composer's Colour Symphony.
Vaughan Williams' Wasps buzz and sting but with the buzzing comes
the quick abrasion of noisy surfaces. The composer takes this at an impatient
pace which saps the great middle theme - another immortal tune 'with legs'.
Still this is what the composer intended?
Hamilton Harty is much under-rated. His Tchaikovskian tone poem is spun and
ripped along in true mastery. The offbeat strokes near the start are given
with zip and impact. Neither Gibson (Classics for Pleasure) nor Bryden Thomson
(Chandos) can quite match the composer's zest and sense of space. At this
speed Harty scorches out some of the fine detail but, by heck, it's exciting
- just think of the rate at which Mravinsky takes the 1960 Leningrad PO (DG)
finale of Tchaikovsky Symphony No 5 and you will know what to expect. Would
that Harty had recorded Ode to a Nightingale with the dedicatee, Agnes
Nicholls, his wife. Now that would have been a major recording event.
As it is this is most heated performance on the disc.
The youngest recording is the Smyth with its galloping call to arms. I am
not sure where this was recorded but there is a much more salubrious feel
to the music and the acoustic seems less on top of the listener than the
other tracks. Smyth leads the orchestra with an enlivening but pliable baton
preferable (by a shading) to Gibson's version on Classics for Pleasure. The
ambience of the final bar is cut brutally short.
In all the above cases the sound cannot hope to match the Gibson, Groves
and Handley comparators.
Regrettably typographical gaffes leap out at you. A hyphenated Vaughan-Williams!
Ethel Smyth becomes SMYTHE (an error blessedly absent from Stephen Follows'
useful notes)! Juy instead of July!
The disc is generously topped up and will be a direct draw for British music
enthusiasts.
Rob Barnett
The disc is generously topped up and will be a direct draw for British music
enthusiasts.
In case of difficulty contact
Symposium Records
110 Derwent Ave
EAST BARNET
HERTS EN4 8LZ
0181 368 8667
Web site
symposium@cwcom.net
