Most helpful customer reviews
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4.0 out of 5 stars
How Beecham conducted Delius in the !920s and 1930s., April 9 2003
Lovers of the music of Delius will not want to be without this collection of the first attempts by his great champion, Sir Thomas Beecham, to record his works. All the items on this CD were recorded between the years 1927 and 1934. The 1934 items were produced for the first volume of the Delius Society, by Walter Legge, working for the first time with Sir Thomas Beecham. How do they sound in 2000? Despite Beecham’s care over phrasing and balance, the presence of the great oboe player Leon Goossens in the orchestra ranks, and the efforts of David Lennick in transferring the wobbly old originals to CD, the results are sonically no more than tolerable. About one third of the long series of recordings Sir Thomas Beecham made with his London Philharmonic Orchestra in the 1930s still sound well, but these are not amongst them. The sound has no transparency. Orchestral colour and sonority is severely limited. The recordings from the 1920s sound better than those of 1934. Fortunately all the items were subsequently re-recorded by Sir Thomas, many of them in stereo, and most of them are still currently available. As the Naxos CD is at super budget price, expense is not likely to be a consideration for committed Delius enthusiasts, but no one should expect this historical issue to win new converts.
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3.0 out of 5 stars
How Beecham conducted Delius in the 1920s and 1930s., Oct 24 2001
Lovers of the music of Delius will not want to be without this collection of the first attempts by his great champion, Sir Thomas Beecham, to record his works. All the items on this CD were recorded between the years 1927 and 1934. The 1934 items were produced for the first volume of the Delius Society, by Walter Legge, working for the first time with Sir Thomas Beecham. How do they sound in 2000? Despite Beecham's care over phrasing and balance, the presence of the great oboe player Leon Goossens in the orchestra ranks, and the efforts of David Lennick in transferring the wobbly old originals to CD, the results are sonically no more than tolerable. About one third of the long series of recordings Sir Thomas Beecham made with his London Philharmonic Orchestra in the 1930s still sound well, but these are not amongst them. The sound has no transparency. Orchestral colour and sonority is severely limited. The recordings from the 1920s sound better than those of 1934. Fortunately all the items were subsequently re-recorded by Sir Thomas, many of them in stereo, and most of them are still currently available. As the Naxos CD is at super budget price, expense is not likely to be a consideration for committed Delius enthusiasts, but no one should expect this historical issue to win new converts.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
The Beecham Magic and Delius, Oct 2 2000
Frederick "Fritz" Delius (1862-1934) was one of the earliest living composers to benefit from recorded representations of his music, this thanks to Thomas Beecham (Delius' advocate on the podium) and the Delius Society (largely Beecham's doing), which sponsored studio sessions and distributed records from the late 1920s through the late 1940s. These recordings have circulated fairly widely in various incarnations, from the original 78 rpm subscription-sets to LP re-issues to CD revivals. Among the characteristics of the Delius Society recordings was (and remains) their technical superiority, their fullness and suavity of sound: Producer Walter Legge especially achieved extraordinary results for the enterprize; but even the pre-Legge Beecham 78s offer better than usual sonic qualities for their era, a fact all the more astonishing considering that some of this music requires large combined forces of orchestra and chorus. Now Naxos has begun reissuing these classic documents at budget-price, making them accessible, one hopes, to a wider audience. The CD under review here is Volume I of a projected series (II has appeared and III is announced as shortly forthcoming). The 1934 recording of Paris: Nocturne (Song of a Great City) offers a good example of just how special these recordings were in their day and still are. Delius calls on a very large orchestra to give a picture in tones of the French metropolis, where he spent, or perhaps misspent, part of his youth, running with Bohemia and sowing his oats (also contracting the venereal infection that later blinded and paralyzed him). David Lennick's digital transfers capture the dark, woody sounds of the celli and low woodwind that open the piece; we sense the great ebony glow at the core of this twenty-minute-plus "night-piece," with its phantasmagoric episodes of vaudeville and shadowy street. The dance-sections come across as vital and pounding; the singing of the strings at 16.20 and on is gorgeous. Beecham pours his life's blood into it. Eventyr, too, of Norwegian inspiration, is a large in scale and massive in sound. The two great shouts from the orchestra halfway through the piece's fifteen minutes must have shocked early listeners unfamiliar with the score. The disc also gives us a selection of miniatures, including the Two Pieces for Orchestra: On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring and Summer Night on the River. A fellow would have to have a hard heart not to be moved by the musical experience on this CD. Thanks to Naxos for resurrecting the old Beecham magic.
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