Haitink's EMI interpretation of Sinfonia antartica is exceptionally fine and I honestly cannot say that Bryden Thomson's approaches it. l treasure, too, the original Barbirolli/Halle LP recording, made by HMV just after the first performances in 1953. This really ought to be made available on CD in a historical series, since it embodies all the composer's wishes. Thomson's tempos are on the slow side. This would not matter if he sustained the tension in the playing; unfortunately it tends to sound indolent, especially and most fatally in the ''Landscape'' movement.
The recording is quite successful in projecting the atmosphere of the music and one hears inner detail that is often obscured, though in some cases I suspect faulty balance rather than interpretative insight—timpani too prominent throughout, for one thing. The wordless women's voices, led by the pure soprano sound of Catherine Bott, are stationed too far away. They sound detached, more like a respectable a cappella choir heard in the distance than the terrifying furies who dwell in the Antarctic blizards. The entry of the organ in ''Landscape'' fails in this performance to be the shock it should be—it is not a glacier, just the organ joining in.
When human warmth enters the music in the ''Intermezzo'' the performance becomes idiomatic, with a beguiling oboe solo. Where this performance disappoints me is in its failure to convey the tragic force of the music; it is a performance of some remarkable and imaginative sonorities rather than an interpretation of a certainly problematic but still impressive symphonic experience.
It was a good idea to pair it with Toward the Unknown Region. Although they are separated by 43 years and therefore by a tremendous advance in styles and technique, they share a sense of adventure into the frozen wastes. Scott's expedition could well have echoed Whitman's ''all is blank before us''. This is a good performance better recorded than Boult's (EMI). But the balance tends to present it as a song for orchestra and chorus rather than for chorus and orchestra and this in turn emphasizes—at the big climaxes in the second half of the work—that the diction of the London Symphony Chorus, particularly of its sopranos and altos, is not its strongest point.'