It was always a joy to hear Lionel Salter, longest-serving contributor to Gramophone, reminiscing about his experiences as the keyboard player for Karl Haas and the London Baroque Ensemble. Here in the very last of Lionel's many sleeve- and booklet-notes, written just before his death in March, he paints a delightful portrait of Karl Haas, a formidable musicologist who arrived in England as a refugee in 1939, and who 'with his impish sense of humour' adopted the word 'Baroque' in the group's title, recognising that the term can also mean 'bizarre'.
That accounts for Dvorak being brought in alongside Mozart, offering in this fine Testament transfer three of the greatest of all wind-band works. What Lionel Salter's note is understandably reticent about is Haas's limitations as a conductor - subject of many funny stories - for what matters is that he had a genius for bringing together the finest chamber musicians in the country.
That is what tempted the young George Martin, as artists and recording manager of the Parlophone label, to make these and other recordings just as shortplaying 78 discs were giving way to LPs. Lionel's insert-note mentions the 'friendly arguments' about speeds at recording sessions, when works were often tackled impromptu, and Haas's 'dislike of any slowing down at ends of movements'. What clearly emerges from these performances is Haas's preference for very fast Allegros.
These mono versions of Mozart's two great wind-octet Serenades, recorded in 1952, are even brisker than the stereo recordings he made five years later for Pye-Nixa with many of the same players including Dennis Brain, Jack Brymer and Sidney Sutcliffe - reissued on CD by EMI almost 10 years ago (CDM7 63598-2 - nla). In both versions it is striking that though rhythms are well lifted, the often-metrical treatment brings a military flavour to Allegro, and that applies very much, too, to the first- movement March of the Dvorak.
Rival versions are almost invariably less regimented than these, but the mastery of individual players still defies the idea of over-rigid performances. The virtuosity at such challenging speeds is breathtaking, and as Lionel Salter points out, there is some delectable interplay between the clarinet of Frederick Thurston and the oboe of Terence MacDonagh in the Dvorak, not just in the slow movement but elsewhere. And although, not surprisingly, I have come to prefer more relaxed readings of the Mozart works, Haas's Nixa versions were those which introduced me to these masterpieces, and I still feel a thrill to hear the ever-incisive Haas thrusting forward in the darkly intense first movement of K388, the more intense for compressing Mozart's message, with neither half of the movement repeated. The transfers are first-rate, even though the clear mono sound remains dry, reflecting the original engineering.'