Albert Sammons, Peers Coetmore, Bbc Symphony Orchestra, Sir Adrian Boult Moeran: Symphony

“If this isn't great interpretation, I don't know what is,” wrote Gramophone’s reviewer in 1968, when this recording was first released, “I have no hesitation in saying that I think it the greatest performance I have yet heard on record.” John Barbirolli, an intense and inspired interpreter of Beethoven’s music, had been conducting the Eroica for many years, but the symphony acquired a special significance for him in the final years of his life. “Strange how the Eroica exhausts me these days,” he wrote in 1966. “It may well be because I am really beginning to plumb its depths.”

The advent of stereo brought forth two competing Gilbert and Sullivan cycles that retain their classic status in divergent ways.
Seasoned Savoyards lean towards Decca's D'Oyly Carte recordings, where the use of singing actors and inclusion of dialogue add up to a palpable theatrical experience. By contrast, EMI's competing cycle featured some of Britain's finest operatic singers of the 1950s and '60s, who largely command both music and text on equal terms. The nine operettas in this series conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent–Trial by Jury, HMS Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance, Patience, Iolanthe, The Mikado, Ruddigore, The Yeomen of the Guard, and The Gondoliers–are repackaged in a budget-priced, space-saving box. True, some might contend that Sargent's stoutly moderate tempos downplay the authors' irreverent bite, but at least you can make out every blasted word. And that's important, since EMI includes no librettos, just a synopsis of each work. As a bonus, Sullivan's orchestral forays outside comic opera fill out the discs, including incidental music to The Tempest and The Merchant of Venice, the touching Overture in C ("In Memoriam"), an attractively tuneful Symphony in E, and a fascinating reconstruction of a Cello Concerto, whose autograph and parts perished in a 1964 fire. You simply cannot find a more comprehensive Gilbert and Sullivan bargain than this highly enticing set. Grab it while you can.

Jed Distler (Amazon.com)

Only a favored number of very old conductors manage the secret of getting more fascinating as the years progress. Like Pablo Casals, Stokowski belonged to that tiny elite. for that reason I've collected all the BBC Legends issues devoted to him, which date from his frequent sojourns to England in his eighties and nineties. Britten's Young Person's Guide from a Proms concert in royal Albert Hall in 1963 with the BBC Sym. features more vivid, up-close sound. This reading has been reissued quite a lot and is marked by Stokowski's rather grave, measured interpretation. He takes this work more seriously than anyone else I've heard; the results are impressive, and more than once you think you're hearing him revisit one of his famous grandiose Bach transcriptions. As an earlier reviewer notes, each variation is turned into a set piece.

When it comes to piano concertos, no two composers wrote more compatible concertos than Grieg and Schumann. Both are in A minor, both are in three movements, and both are ecstatically lyric, tenderly romantic, and amazingly virtuosic. And both fit very comfortably together as a recorded double bill, a coupling that has attracted some of the greatest pianists of the postwar years: Claudio Arrau with Colin Davis and the Boston Symphony, Leon Fleisher with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra, Walter Gieseking with Wilhelm Furtwängler and the Berlin Philharmonic, Sviatoslav Richter with Lovro von Matacic and the Monte Carlo National Opera Orchestra, and this recording by Stephen Kovacevich with Colin Davis and the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

It was this set which, in company with one from Sir Colin Davis issued by Philips a few weeks earlier, inaugurated the era of 'progressive' Messiah recordings. They had of course been foreshadowed—by Sir Adrian Boult, notably, and by the work of such editors as John Tobin and Watkins Shaw. But this was one of the first to use a chamber orchestra, lively tempos and ornamentation: and between them Davis and Mackerras made us listen afresh to a work whose performance traditions had threatened to become hidebound… The forces aren't 'authentic', but rather larger, and women's voices are used in the chorus. It is however an excellent chorus, well disciplined and clean.

Nicholas Maw's Odyssey is a landmark in contemporary music; at approximately 90 minutes it is one of the longest continuous examples of music written for full-orchestra and received a first, truncated, performance at the 1987 BBC Proms. It took Maw many years to complete and was later recorded to great acclaim by Sir Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.

A broad and meticulous selection of orchestral works and concertos by Gerald Finzi is here matched by a first-class cast of soloists, supported by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Sir Andrew Davis, expert in British repertoire and conducting this year’s Last Night of the Proms. Paul Watkins displays exhilarating virtuosity in the Cello Concerto, a central work on this album, composed in the wake of the devastating news that Finzi was terminally ill, but yet filled with ‘vigorous, almost turbulent thematic material’, as he wrote in the programme note for the work’s premiere at the Cheltenham Music Festival in 1955. Louis Lortie, for his part, tackles the high-spirited and majestic Grand Fantasia and Toccata, the Fantasia originally conceived as part of a concerto for piano and strings and first performed on two pianos. This contrasts with the more restrained Eclogue for Piano and Strings, timeless, and blessed with a mood of benediction. This album also features the orchestral Nocturne (subtitled ‘New Year Music’), dark, misty, and at times ironic.

Helen Grime - Woven Space - London Symphony Orchestra, Sir Simon Rattle (2019) {LSO Live}
FLAC (tracks) - 16bit/48kHz - Official Digital Download (deezer.com) -> 99 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 52 Mb | Cover | 5% repair rar
© 2019 LSO Live
Classical / Modern Classical / 21st Century / Orchestral

Renowned composer Helen Grime makes her LSO Live debut with Woven Space. Originally beginning life as Fanfares, a single movement that opened This Is Rattle, the RPS Award-winning festival that marked Sir Simon’s start as Music Director of the London Symphony Orchestra, the work is inspired by the willow sculptures of artist Laura Ellen Bacon, which the composer discovered entwined among trees in the gardens of Chatsworth House.

Born in 1885, Alban Berg was one of the most significant composers of the Second Viennese School, whose output proved tremendously influential in the development of music in the twentieth century. He was a student of Schoenberg, who found that his juvenile compositions were almost exclusively written for voice; his natural ability to write lyrical melodic lines (even in later life while following the restrictions of twelve-tone serialism) probably remained the most outstanding quality of his style. His Op. 1 Piano Sonata was the fulfilment of a task set by Schoenberg to write non-vocal music. The Passacaglia, written between the sonata and World War I was only completed in short-score, and may have been intended to form part of a larger work.