Sir Adrian Boult: The Warner Classics Edition (Warner Classics)

Sir Adrian Boult: The Warner Classics Edition
The Mono Recordings 1920-57 on HMV, Pye Nixa and Parlophone
Warner Classics 2173258498 [36 CDs]

Adrian Boult’s first recordings were made for HMV in 1920, and this 36-CD box charts his Warner legacy (HMV, Pye Nixa and Parlophone) from then until the last of his monos in 1957. The earliest phase of his recording life is covered by the first disc, almost all of which was made by the acoustical process during a period that saw him moving around competing companies such as Edison Bell and Vocalion, neither of which come under Warner’s umbrella and are therefore not represented in this box. Before listening, I was rather concerned about the transfers of Tommasini’s The Good-Humoured Ladies and Respighi’s La Boutique fantasque given past unsatisfactory experiences with Art & Son of such material but I was very pleasantly surprised. They sound natural and open and haven’t been subject to any obtrusive noise suppression. The performances are vigorous and even lusty and remind us that Boult was a fine ballet and indeed operatic conductor, when he was given the chance.

As a sign of things to come in his discography he also recorded George Butterworth’s A Shropshire Lad Rhapsody of which he had heard Nikisch’s premiere a few years before. It’s slightly abridged, in only his second session (a recording in 1922 of the first of Butterworth’s Idylls was never issued), but is a historically important recording with plenty of portamenti. The other valuable item is Arthur Bliss’ Rout with the excellent soprano soloist Stella Power. The orchestra throughout these acoustic sides is the British Symphony Orchestra, an ensemble of ex-servicemen with some fine section principals not least the leader (was it Frederick Holding?), principal trumpet and some first-class winds. A casualty of this time is Bantock’s Hebridean Symphony, recorded with the City of Birmingham Orchestra in early 1925 but never issued. This first CD disc ends with Boult ensconced as conductor of the BBC Symphony, his first issued recordings being Chopin’s Funeral March arranged by Elgar, and Brahms’ Tragic Overture, the earlier of his two mono recordings of it.

Pristine Audio is in the midst of restoring the pre-War Boult-BBC Symphony recordings – other than the Concerto collaborations during these years – in a sequence of twofers. It would be redundant to repeat what I – and in volume 3 my colleague Gwyn Parry-Jones – have written about these recordings so I’ll link to the three volumes already released 1 2 3. Of the concerto recordings I only need add that they compare favourably to other restorations, for example those on Naxos of the Backhaus and Schnabel collaborations, whether Artur Schnabel in solo concerto or Artur and his son Karl Ulrich in the Mozart and Bach Concertos for two pianos. There’s a defined solidity to the bass line that gives these Warner transfers a very slight edge. These pre-War recordings take us to CD 10 which also includes the superb recording of Elgar’s Second Symphony made in Bedford in 1944. The next disc is something of a miscellany but includes Aubrey Brain performing Mozart’s Third Horn Concerto.

The discs are not presented chronologically so you’ll dance around in Boult’s discography a little bit. For example, on 9 April 1940 Boult recorded Tchaikovsky’s Capriccio italien and Marche slave followed by Vaughan Williams’ Tallis Fantasia ending up with Sibelius’ Romance in C. The Tchaikovsky pieces are in CD 10, the VW in CD 11 and the Sibelius in CD 8. Speaking of the Vaughan Williams, you’ll find the Tallis Fantasia dramatic and intense, more vertical than Baribrolli’s horizontal way with it. It appears in the (almost) all-British CD 12 with his second version of A Shropshire Lad coupled with Liadov’s Kikimora, probably one of the less well-known Boult recordings – both these were recorded with the Hallé. There’s superb Job, and an equally convincing Parry Blest Pair of Sirens with the LSO. The first recording of Bliss’s Piano Concerto with Solomon can now be augmented by the New York premiere of the work, to be found on a blistering APR release. You’ll also find Boult’s first Planets in CD 13, the first of very many live and studio versions.

Warner has lumped concertos in CD 14. Solomon’s performance of Beethoven’s C minor Concerto sounds excellent here and is coupled with Casals’ Elgar, much reissued, and the only two movements he recorded, the following day, of Haydn’s Concerto in D, in the Gevaert edition. Casals curtailed the session in fury at Britain’s attitude toward Franco’s Spain. VW’s Sixth Symphony and Flos campi with violist William Primrose are tied together in CD 15, and Elgar’s First Symphony is conjoined to Hamilton Harty’s version of Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks in the next disc. CD 17 is an all-British miscellany that includes VW’s A Song of Thanksgiving, with soprano Betty Dolemore and reciter Robert Speaight. This piece had originally been called Thanksgiving for Victory and elsewhere (I have it on Intaglio) you can hear a performance with Elsie Suddaby and Valentine Dyall from a 1944 Bedford broadcast. A Lark Ascending with a too-tensile Jean Pougnet, Elgar’s Falstaff and two curios make up the rest of the disc. Firstly there is Purcell’s Soul of the World from Hail, Bright Cecilia – probably the oldest music Boult ever recorded – and then the choral version of Serenade to Music, these last live from the inaugural concert given at the Royal Festival Hall in 1951. CD 17 is not remastered by Art & Son – there are a few other such examples in the box – but come from pre-existing transfers, other than the Purcell which seems to have been newly mastered and is credited simply to Parlophone Records in 2025.

CD 18 is devoted to Yehudi Menuhin and includes four previously unreleased performances in addition to Chausson’s Poème, VW’s Violin Concerto and Vivaldi’s Concerto ‘Il piacere’. These unpublished works are Saint-Saëns’ Introduction et Rondo capriccioso and Havanaise both recorded on 15 February 1952 as part of the Chausson session, Bartók’s Rhapsody No.2 recorded on 18 February on the same day as the VW Concerto, and Bach’s Concerto No.1 in A minor recorded on 1 April 1953 at sessions that produced the Vivaldi and Mendelssohn’s Concerto in D minor. These seem to have been problematic sessions as the VW Concerto was not issued at the time and only surfaced many years later. Menuhin went on to re-record the Saint-Saëns pieces with Alceo Galliera in 1957 and the Bartók with Boulez in 1968 and indeed the Bach, self-directed, with the Robert Masters Chamber Orchestra in 1958 but these disinterred recordings are nevertheless valuable. I’m not sure why the Bach, in particular, made with the Philharmonia, wasn’t released unless it was for lack of a suitable coupling. Mendelssohn’s D minor Concerto and Sibelius’ Concerto, more familiar fare, appear on the next disc.

The 1953 Enigma Variations and The Wand of Youth Suite No.1 are heard in 2013 remasterings in CD 20 but Belshazzar’s Feast with Dennis Noble, and VW’s English Folk Song Suite and the trio of other pieces, including another Tallis Fantasia, have been newly remastered by Art & Son. One of the most concentrated bodies of repertoire is the cycle of Brahms symphonies and other orchestral works recorded by Boult and what was known for contractual reasons as the Philharmonic Promenade Orchestra because these were Pye Nixa discs and the London Philharmonic was contracted to Decca at the time. The Brahms cycle occupied Boult during November 1954 – the Alto Rhapsody features Monica Sinclair – and for good measure he added Mendelssohn’s Third and Fourth Symphonies and a favoured warhorse of his, Schubert’s Ninth, before the month was over. Clearly the stereo cycle of the Brahms he made in the 1970-72 period will prove sonically more attractive to listeners but this earlier cycle has a dynamism that Boult sometimes only generated in the heat of a live concert, as any listener who has heard his 1970s broadcasts will know. His conceptions were never set in stone – again, as anyone who has heard his stereo and live VW Fifth Symphony will agree – and so this earlier cycle, well enough recorded for the time and exceptionally volatile in the case of the First Symphony (superb by any standard), should be exceptionally attractive. I’d add further that the Second Symphony and Fourth are equally fine and the Third only slightly less so. Sometimes orchestral discipline slips – these weren’t the LPO’s best days – but it’s a tribute to Boult’s sense of studio concentration, in which his BBC days had so well versed him, that he carries them with him in conceptually highly satisfying traversals.

There’s some excellent news in CD 24 – Beethoven’s First Symphony was recorded in July 1950 and is making its first ever appearance in this box. Again, it’s hard to say why this wasn’t released but it was definitely rejected for publication at the time. There are some omissions that may (or may not) be due to rights issues – such as mezzo Blanche Thebom’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen made over the previous two days in 1950 for HMV (and RCA Victor in the USA). Then there is also the Rossini-Respighi Rossiniana ballet music and Respighi’s own Feste Romane. There is also the Boult-narrated Britten Young Person’s Guide to the OrchestraI, for a long time unissued, but which turned up on EMI Phoenixa. I’m rather confused by the LP called ‘Volume VII of the History of Music in Sound’. This consisted of Boult conducting excepts from Stamitz’s La Melodia Germanica symphony and music by C.P.E Bach, Georg Matthias Monn (with cellist William Pleeth), three Haydn German Dances and one movement from J.C. Bach’s Keyboard Concerto played by Robert Collet, recordings dating from 21 May 1952 and 25 July 1955. This last date is when they were all re-recorded. This box suggests that the C.P.E Bach alone comes from the 1952 sessions and everything else from the 1955 remakes. Maybe it would have too much to have included both sets of recordings of the same music but the box is called ‘all his mono recordings’ so, since they’re from different sessions, I would have hoped both sets would have been included – and not one cherry-picked from the earlier recording and the remainder from the re-makes, if indeed that is what has happened and I’m not mis-reading things.

There is an all-Mendelssohn disc of overtures and A Midsummer Night’s Dream music, in addition to those two perfectly serviceable recordings of the symphonies. Boult’s Mendelssohn has been largely overlooked so this box offers a chance to get acquainted. Tchaikovsky was a composer Boult conducted more than one might thank – he recorded Symphonies 3, 5, and 6 though one couldn’t say with the precision of Markevich, say. However, he did record the Violin Concerto and, here in this box, the Piano Concerto No.1 for Paul Badura-Skoda, another forgotten recording. The more recent Peter Katin traversal from 1967 is sometimes reissued but not, so far as I’m aware, this Badura-Skoda. Boult also recorded Delibes and Suppé and a disc of Bartók, with whom he’d performed as an accompanist when he was at the BBC. This disc of the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta and the Divertimento is another disc that has seen little if any reissue in the years since and finds the orchestra on uneven ground. In fact, roughly half the box has seen no reissue which makes the restoration of discs like this, even if they’re not sonically or performance-wise comparable with the very best of the time, so valuable to collectors.

He recorded Robert Simpson’s First Symphony in January 1956. Simpson was a man with whom he felt an affinity, not least for his trenchant views about BBC programming in the 1950s. I’d not heard this before and I am fully aware that sonically, and maybe interpretatively, it has to cede to Vernon Handley’s much later recording but it strikes me as both powerfully conceived and as well played as one could expect in the circumstances. It was made for the British Council. If Purcell is the oldest music in the box, this is the most recent. There are, finally, two CDs containing Sibelius tone poems. One has been reissued in recent years on Somm. Boult was a fine Sibelius conductor and whilst he couldn’t have embarked on a symphonic cycle, even had he wished to, at a time when Decca had just released Anthony Collins’s set, there was a chance later on. His later live Seventh is superb and notwithstanding other cycles in the years 1967-74, he really should have been given the green light to record them all.

The large majority of these performances have, as noted, been remastered by Art & Son Studio and they have done a fine job. No one can make monos shine and gleam but there’s a welcome definition to the bass line. I have queries about some of what I believe to be missing items from his monos in this box but there are no major omissions, apart from the Mahler song cycle. There’s an attractive booklet in English, German and French with a work list at the back that directs you to the CD housing the piece for which you’re looking. In this (exhaustive – apologies) trawl I have been strongly helped by having had access to two essential Boult accoutrements – discographies by Alan Sanders and Philip Stuart. Given Boult’s significance as a conductor and the unavailability of much of this material for decades, I’m more than happy to have a box that is competitively priced, finely documented and excellently compiled.

Jonathan Woolf

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Contents

CD 2 BEETHOVEN Symphonie No. 8 ⋅ Coriolan Overture ⋅ Egmont Overture | BRAHMS Hungarian Dances Nos. 19-21 | WEBER Der Freischütz Overture | WAGNER Tristan und Isolde Prelude to Act 1 ⋅ Parsifal Good Friday Music ⋅ Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg Prelude to Act 1

CD 3 MOZART Symphony No. 41 “Jupiter” ⋅ Der Schauspieldirektor Overture | BRAHMS Piano Concerto No. 1 (Backhaus)

CD 4 BACH Orchestral Suite No. 3 ⋅ Violin Partita No. 3 Prelude | MOZART Così fan tutte Overture | SCHUMANN Manfred Overture | MENDELSSOHN A Midsummer Night’s Dream Nocturne ⋅ The Hebrides Overture ⋅ Ruy Blas Overture | BERLIOZ Le Carnaval romain | SAINT-SAËNS Bacchanale

CD 5 SCHUBERT Symphony No. 9 “Great” | HUMPERDINCK Hänsel und Gretel (exc.) |
ELGAR The Dream of Gerontius Prelude

CD 6 BRAHMS Piano Concerto No. 2 (Schnabel) | NICOLAI Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor Overture | SUPPÉ Leichte Kavallerie Overture | AUBER La Muette de Portici Overture

CD 9 MOZART Concerto for two pianos K. 365 | BACH Concerto for two pianos BWV 1061 (A. & KU Schnabel) | TCHAIKOVSKY Serenade

CD 10 BLISS Music for strings | ELGAR Symphony No. 2

CD 11 TCHAIKOVSKY Capriccio italien ⋅ Marche Slave | MOZART Horn Concerto No. 3 (A. Brain) ⋅ Symphony No. 32 | MENDELSSOHN A Midsummer Night’s Dream (exc.)

CD 12 VAUGHAN WILLIAMS Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis ⋅ Job | BUTTERWORTH A Shropshire Lad | LIADOV Kikimora | PARRY Blest Pair of Sirens

CD 13 BLISS Piano Concerto (Solomon) | HOLST The Planets

CD 14 BEETHOVEN Piano Concerto No. 3 (Solomon) | ELGAR Cello Concerto | HAYDN Cello Concerto No. 2 (exc.) (Casals)

CD 15 VAUGHAN WILLIAMS Flos campi (Primrose) ⋅ Symphony No. 6 | NICOLAI Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor Overture | BRAHMS Academic Festival Overture ⋅ Hungarian Dances Nos. 17 & 18

CD 16 ELGAR Symphony No. 1 ⋅ Fantasia & Fugue | HANDEL Music for the Royal Fireworks

CD 17 VAUGHAN WILLIAMS A Song Of Thanksgiving (Dolemore) · The Lark Ascending (Pougnet) · Serenade to Music | ELGAR Falstaff | PURCELL Soul of the World

CD 18 CHAUSSON Poème | SAINT-SAËNS Introduction et Rondo capriccioso FIRST RELEASE ⋅ Havanaise FIRST RELEASE | VAUGHAN WILLIAMS Violin Concerto “Concerto accademico” | BARTÓK Violin Rhapsody No. 2 FIRST RELEASE | BACH Violin Concerto No. 1 FIRST RELEASE | VIVALDI Violin Concerto “Il piacere” (Menuhin)

CD 19 MENDELSSOHN Violin Concerto | SIBELIUS Violin Concerto (Menuhin)

CD 20 ELGAR Variations “Enigma⋅ The Wand of Youth, Suite No. 1 ⋅ Pomp and Circumstance March No. 3

CD 21 WALTON Belshazzar’s Feast | VAUGHAN WILLIAMS English Folk Song Suite ⋅ Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1 ⋅ Fantasia on “Greensleeves” ⋅ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis

CD 22 BRAHMS Symphony No. 1 ⋅ Tragic Overture

CD 23 BRAHMS Symphony No. 2 ⋅ Academic Festival Overture

CD 24 BRAHMS Symphony No. 3 ⋅ Alto Rhapsody (Sinclair) | BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 1 FIRST RELEASE

CD 25 BRAHMS Symphony No. 4 ⋅ Variations on a Theme by Haydn

CD 26 MENDELSSOHN Symphonies Nos. 3 (Scottish) and 4 (Italian)

CD 27 SCHUBERT Symphony No. 9 “Great”

CD 28 MENDELSSOHN Overtures from The Hebrides ⋅ Fairy Tale of the Beautiful Melusine ⋅ Calm sea and prosperous voyage ⋅ Ruy Blas | A Midsummer Night’s Dream

CD 29 TCHAIKOVSKY Piano Concerto No. 1 (Badura-Skoda) | DELIBES Coppelia, ballet suite ⋅ Sylvia, ballet suite ⋅ La Source Valse

CD 30 SUPPÉ Overtures

CD 31 BARTÓK Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta ⋅ Divertimento

CD 33 ELGAR In the South, Overture ⋅ Nursery Suite | SIMPSON Symphony No. 1

CD 34 ELGAR 5 Pomp and Circumstance Marches ⋅ Froissart ⋅ Dream Children | BEETHOVEN The Ruins of Athens (exc.) | WOLF Italian Serenade

CD 35 SIBELIUS En Saga ⋅ The Swan of Tuonela ⋅ Pohjola’s Daughter ⋅ The Bard ⋅ Lemminkäinen’s Return

CD 36 SIBELIUS Tapiola ⋅ The Oceanides ⋅ Night Ride and Sunrise ⋅ Finlandia ⋅ The Tempest

Soloists
Betty Dolemore (soprano)
Monica Sinclair (contralto)
Wilhelm Backhaus (piano)
Paul Badura-Skoda (piano)
Robert Collet (piano)
Artur Schnabel (piano)
Karl Ulrich Schnabel (piano)
Solomon (piano)
Yehudi Menuhin (violin)
Jean Pougnet (violin)
William Primrose (viola)
Pablo Casals (cello)
William Pleeth (cello)
Aubrey Brain (horn)
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Hallé Orchestra
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Philharmonia Orchestra
British Symphony Orchestra
London Symphony Orchestra
Royal Festival Orchestra
Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra
SIR ADRIAN BOULT
CD 1-2, 3*, 4-6, 7*, 8*, 9*, 10*, 11, 15*, 16*, 18*, 21-32, 35-36: Newly remastered from original source by Art & Son Studio

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