It cannot have been an easy evening for Sir Adrian when he conducted at the Royal Festival Hall's opening concert in May 1951. A new auditorium with unfamiliar acoustics and a specially formed choir and orchestra presented their own special problems and he had to share the programme with Sargeant, with whom he had little in common. Small wonder, then, that the Serenade to Music, recorded at the concert in its inferior choral version and with not a few coughs from the audience, rather fails to take wing, beautiful though the outlines of the performance are. The sound quality obtained from the original tape source is far better than can be achieved from the two ten-inch 78s, but Boult's later HMV version with 16 solo singers is much superior (ASD2538, 4/70—nla). All the Remaining items derive from wax originals; and a very clear recording was obtained for the delightful little Ethel Smyth pieces, played in very lively, witty fashion by the hand-picked orchestra: it's particularly good to have these tasty morsels available when the original 78 is so scarce.
If Boult recorded the Butterworth piece on three other occasions this version has a special intensity; another example where a wartime recording of English music inspired a particularly poignant response from the players. Here the sound is a little grey. The BBC SO recordings on Side 2 are a little confined and were never easy to reproduce cleanly in their original form, but the transfer engineers have done so well to clarify the sound image. Portsmouth Point receives an expert, perky reading which shows the calibre of Boult's orchestra; and clearly Fred Gaisberg, HMV's recording manager, saw Boult as the man to fill gaps in the Elgar repertoire left when the composer was no longer alive to make his own recordings. He was not to know that test pressings containing Elgar's own live 1927 performance of the Gerontius Prelude survived in private hands and would be issued half a century later (Opal OPAL810, 6/83). Boult's version, though eloquent enough, does not reach the heights of Sir Edward himself. And other comparisons are invited by the fact that these recordings do have such a similar sound to those made by the composer. Boult's version of the Imperial March is crisply done but it lacks the rhythmic subtlety, the cunning use of rubato and the sheer impetus of Elgar's own march recordings. Sospiri, which Boult did not record again, is however given a sensitive, gravely beautiful performance, and this most interesting and enterprising reissue ends with a scintillating account of Crown Imperial, its fresh, exciting quality deriving no doubt from the fact that it was the march's very first performance, recorded in advance of the 1937 Coronation premiere so that pressings could go on sale immediately after the celebrations.'