Docklight 1.9

These Decca recordings of Vaughan Williams's complete symphonies appear in a boxed set for the first time ever, and they feature such august personages as sopranos Isobel Baillie and Margaret Ritchie, baritone John Cameron and speaker John Gielgud!
Adrian Boult conducts the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

One of the most fascinating recording projects of this period was Sir Roger Norrington's pioneering set of Beethoven symphonies with The London Classical Players. Here at long last–after a century and a half of neglect–was a conductor bravely determined to conduct these symphonies according to Beethoven's difficult metronome markings, and as played on the original instruments that Beethoven had composed for–that is, the very sounds that he must have had in his mind when he wrote this music down. Norrington astutely saw that Beethoven's original brass and percussion instruments play a crucially prominent role in these symphonies, and most importantly, that they cannot be tempered without diminishing the passionate intensity of the music itself.