Gramophone, September 2010 issue
Editor’s Choice - Reissue of the month


Followers of British music and its history on disc will inevitably be drawn to a neatly packaged and skilfully transferred three-disc collection on First Hand Records which features various 1956 Nixa-Westminster stereo recordings by the London Philharmonic under Sir Adrian Boult. Future discs in the same series will cover all four Schumann symphonies and the complete Berlioz overtures, but this particular collection is rather special on a number of counts. For starters, it includes a 1956 taping of Elgar’s Cockaigne Overture that is receiving its first UK release, a keen-edged, spirited performance that displays all the usual Boult characteristics: textural clarity, rhythmic solidity, respect for the spirit of the musical moment and, of course, for the letter of the score.
Boult’s 1956 Elgar Second Symphony, the second of five that have taught us so much about this indelible masterpiece, is in some key respects the best of all: energy levels are high, the slow movement peaks with unprecedented levels of eloquence, and although hardly the best played of the five it’s not a wit less affecting and at times levels, artistically speaking, with the justifiably fabled 1944 BBC Symphony Orchestra recording. The sound quality is quite different to the last transfer I heard (Nixa, NIXCD 6011): there, a touch of added ambience leant the recording extra depth whereas here an extra degree of clarity is quite noticeable, especially at the start of the third movement where the woodwinds are far more “present” than before.
Boult’s ’56 Falstaff is full of adorable things, not least the tenderness of the “Dream Interlude”, though in general its 1950 predecessor (now out on Testament) has firmer contours, especially in “Falstaff’s March”. Also Westminster’s principal balance engineer Herbert Zeithammer favoured an unusually close placing of the percussion, upstaging even the drum-crazed Mercury team from around the same time, and that oddball bias is especially (and sometimes distractingly) present in the Nixa Boult Falstaff. Strings too are often heard from a rostrum perspective and that’s where Boult’s Walton First Symphony scores, or fails, according to your perspective on such things. In our May issue Andrew Achenbach sympathetically reviewed the more ambient Somm transfer, which makes nothing like the same impact (compare the two at the start of the Presto). I feel utterly drawn in, while the reading itself has real bite, with a first movement that builds patiently but inexorably.
Boult’s perky accounts of Britten’s adaptations of Rossini, the Soirées and Matinées musicales, are well worth hearing and his Four Sea Interludes and Passacaglia from Peter Grimes suggest a markedly Sibelian bias. The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, the one mono item included, marries Boult’s fatherly and rather formal presentation of the spoken commen tary to a well-paced and generally well-played account of the musical score. The Variations and a Fugue on a Theme of Purcell (the most sensible title for the work when divorced from its narration) is evidently the same performance, albeit in stereo. A rather more novel difference concerns one or two brief “extensions” at the front end of the piece that provide space for the narrator’s words and which are kept in from the original, whereas most concert performances that I’ve heard don’t include them. It’s no big deal either way, but rather took me by surprise first time around.
Reviewed by:Rob Cowan