Writing last autumn in Spectator's special French issue, Digby Anderson suggested that 1962 was the last year of the Old France, the last year when everything was evidently different: from lavatories, cars and churches to the smell of drinks and disinfectant. I also suspect that it was about this time that orchestras ceased to be different. Certainly, the Concertgebouw Orchestra were more unmistakably themselves (if no more or less a centre of musical excellence then as now) in the days of the famous orange-labelled Decca LXT records. Irrespective of whether Kleiber, Krips, Jochum, Monteux, Szell or van Beinum was in charge, the playing had a vitality, clarity and robust good sense that was distinctly their own. In the 1950s, the Concertgebouw wind playing, with its immediately recognizable blend of timbres, was equalled only by that of our own Philharmonia Orchestra or Beecham's rather different RPO. We hear this very clearly in van Beinum's splendidly direct account of the St Antoni Variations, though the scrawny string sound is also characteristic of some Decca/Concertgebouw recordings of the period.
In its day, Curzon's account of the D minor Piano Concerto was justly famous. The Record Guide (Collins: 1955) gave it the coveted two stars, explaining: ''Curzon emerges victorious as much on account of the fine support afforded him by the Amsterdam orchestra and conductor and by Decca's engineers as for his deeply felt and magisterial performance''. Curzon re-recorded the concerto, again for Decca, with Szell and the LSO in 1962, a performance which, it must be said, eclipses this one sonically and, perhaps, musically. But van Beinum yields remarkably little to Szell in sheer dynamism and control of the lyric flow and there are things here—Curzon's playing of most of the slow movement—which remain object lessons in meditative, re-creative Brahms playing of a dizzyingly high order of sensibility.'