Beecham conducts Favorite Overtures (LPO)

First off, my thanks to jsserraglio for fixing the picture above. The original post included an image with serious barrel distortion that he fixed and sent back to me. I appreciate it a lot.

I have had these two overtures ready for some time, but got stuck on the third of the fourth in the 78rpm set, Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture, which is in fairly poor shape. Having been absent from posting for so long, I have decided to put up the two that are done and to add the other two, including The Merry Wives of Windsor, at a later date, if and when I can bring them into decent sonic shape.

These pieces are all readily available in recordings with Beecham made with the Royal Philharmonic. I love his RPO recordings, but his London Philharmonic records have always had a very special place in my affections, and he is a conductor about whom I am a completest; I want every recording he ever made. He was my first "favorite", and although I no longer describe my response to artists in those limiting terms, my regard for his music-making has only grown through the years. The musical world is richer for his recordings of Sibelius, Mozart, Haydn, and for the few opera recordings that have come down to us. Would there were more. His recording of the Mendelssohn Reformation Symphony is still my favorite after all these years, his LPO recordings of Mozart are peerless, his Delius (a composer I like a lot) set the standard. His sometimes mordant wit, known in countless retellings, has sometimes made him more famous for what he said than for the sterling performances passed down to us in recordings.

He introduced Richard Strauss to England, and the live performance of his Elektra with Paul Schoeffler, Elisabeth Höngen, Ljuba Welitsch, and Erna Schlüter in the title role, is a chilling account of murder, and the psychological cost of vengeance. But despite his important achievements in music of great seriousness and profundity, he is best known to many for his "Lollipops" --- overtures and light fare, which, in fact, nobody did better. Listen to his recorded RPO performance of the "La Gazza Ladra" overture; it is pure genius.

So, while I will continue to work on the other two overtures of this set as time allows, I just did not want to wait any further to post the Mozart Don Giovanni and Berlioz's Roman Carnival. Enjoy!


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Beecham conducts Sibelius Symphonies No. 2 and No. 4

I'm pleased to be able to offer these two performances of Sibelius by Beecham. They are available on CD, the Second Symphony in the BBC series of historical broadcast performances, the Fourth on Naxos, but with copyright restrictions preventing its release in the U.S. The coupling here is not to my knowledge among the compilations available commercially.

The Second Symphony recording is a live performance with the BBC Symphony Orchestra from October 10, 1951. It has the usual coughs and throat clearings one would expect at an event during a British autumn, but they are not really distracting or very prominent. The sonic quality of the original recording has some problems, distortion in loud passages and the usual, run of the mill difficulties from live performance in the golden past. Given the excitement of the reading, they are a minor matter, hardly noticed through engagement with the music. This is even better than Sir Thomas' studio recordings, in themselves quite wonderful. Beecham's approach to Sibelius is more sinewy, more classical, less lushly romantic than that (usually) of conductors like Ormandy or Barbirolli. I like both kinds of Sibelius, and from any point of view, Beecham is a masterful conductor of this composer.

The Fourth Symphony was an early recording done for the Sibelius Society after it became clear that the successor to Robert Kajanus at the helm of the Helsinki Philharmonic, Georg Schnéevoigt, had very different ideas of the Symphony than those of its composer. Be that as it may, this recording by Beecham was for long considered the point of reference for recorded performances of the work, a position that not everyone feels it has definitively yielded.
If Sibelius, in his irritable last years, said unkind things about Beecham's performance, in favor of that of the twice Nazified Herbert von Karajan, he was nonetheless enthusiastic about it at the time it was made. Much like Sir Thomas, Professor Sibelius could be a prickly character; and as his performance suggestions for various works did not at all remain consistent over time, while simple matters like metronome markings were not always published at places in the score where he later expressed indignation that they were not followed, one can be forgiven for finding several different solutions to the same problem equally satisfying in general musical terms.

The slight "thumps" in the last measures of the 4th symphony were apparently on the source 78s. I have more than one copy of the LP my recording was made from, and they were on all of them.

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