Here is a feast for all Anglophiles. First comes a sparkling selection from Walton’s Facade conducted by the composer in November 1929. Recorded at London’s Chenil Galleries, it features the incomparable Edith Sitwell and brilliant young Constant Lambert as narrators. The 24-year-old Lambert is entrusted with seven out of the 11 chosen items and his virtuoso, clean-cut delivery was deemed ideal by the score’s creator. It is followed by Lambert’s January 1930 premiere recording of his own indelible Rio Grande (with Sir Hamilton Harty a most accomplished and poetic piano soloist). Five years ago, as part of their Great Recordings of the Century series, EMI reissued Lambert’s fine 1949 remake with the Philharmonia and Kyla Greenbaum (9/92 – nla), but the earlier Halle account remains something to treasure, possessing an exuberance and unforgettable poignancy that continue to shine like a beacon across the decades. Fortunately, Symposium’s honest-to-goodness transfer is a great improvement on its curiously muffled BBC Records predecessor (9/90 – nla); somewhat surprisingly, Anthony Griffith’s transfer for EMI (last available on a Treasury LP, 10/88 – nla) has yet to make it to CD.
Next, we get the four excerpts from Bliss’s legendary score for Things to come which the composer was able to commit to disc with the LSO nearly one whole year before the February 1936 sessions for the soundtrack proper. For the latter enterprise, Muir Mathieson was at the helm and it is he who conducts the magnificent “March” and “Epilogue” which make up the remainder of Bliss’s concert suite. The composer-directed items are, of course, already available on Dutton Laboratories’ invaluable “Bliss conducts Bliss” collection (8/95) in a slightly quieter (though not necessarily more natural-sounding) transfer than the present one.
Lambert reappears as the director of a most moving rendering of Warlock’s masterpiece The curlew. This, the work’s first recording (and the final venture to be realized by the Gramophone-funded National Gramophonic Society), dates from March 1931, a mere three months after Warlock’s death, and with the exception of the flautist, features the same line-up as performed the piece at the Warlock Memorial Concert broadcast from the Wigmore Hall one month previously. It is, as I say, a most eloquent, committed display, tenor John Armstrong’s ardent, rather tremulous manner serving up a vivid reminder of the stylistic practice of the period. Leslie Woodgate’s 1936 version of Warlock’s delectable Corpus Christi with the BBC Chorus marked the debut on disc of Peter Pears (heard here in his freshest voice), while John Ansell’s lively (and extremely rare) 1929 Decca recording of Lord Berners’s mischievous Fugue in C minor rounds off a valuable, generously full anthology. Transfers throughout are well made and pleasingly ‘non-interventionist’.
AA