‘He has a claim to be the finest ever British violinist’: Albert Sammons, 1943
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Vaughan Williams may have had a mixed reputation as a conductor, but in his 1952 account of his Fifth Symphony with the London Philharmonic Orchestra (Somm), he captures the beauty of his creation with a hypnotic degree of tension unknown in any other interpretation. Another composer whose authenticity in one of his notable works was a stunning achievement was Arthur Bliss, who recorded his Colour Symphony in 1955 with the London Symphony Orchestra. Dutton’s remastering of it gives the work a coherence and clarity that accentuate its originality.
A conductor who never received the honours he merited was Vernon Handley, who was responsible for three of the finest recordings of British music ever made. One is his 1992 account of Herbert Howells’s masterpiece Hymnus Paradisi (Hyperion). Not only does he take the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic at an ideal pace, but his two soloists elevate something in any case overwhelming to perfection: the tenor John Mark Ainsley is immaculate, but the soprano soloist, Julie Kennard, is better still – exactly what Howells must have envisaged when he wrote the piece.
Eight years earlier, Handley, Howard Shelley and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra made a breathtaking disc for Lyrita of two little-known piano concertos: Vaughan Williams’s, a masterpiece barely heard since before the Second World War, and John Foulds’s Dynamic Triptych. The Vaughan Williams concerto was later rearranged for two pianos because it was considered so difficult to play; Shelley’s command and virtuosity make it seem simple and glorious. He does the same with the Foulds, a work almost unknown when his interpretation appeared, and which gained a new lease of life thanks to it. As with so many of these recordings, the performance transforms a fine piece of music into a work of genius: and these concerti, in these interpretations, are to my mind the finest examples of all.
This Christmas, should you wish to buy the music lover in your life some of the best recordings of British music ever made, which would they be? Allow me to make a few suggestions.
I would start with Albert Sammons’s 1929 recording of the Elgar Violin Concerto (Naxos), conducted by Henry Wood and the first complete recording of the work. Sammons has a claim to be the finest ever British violinist; his technical skill was astonishing, as the ferocious tempi of this reading underline. The music is so electrifying that it compensates for the lack of crystal-clear sound.
Sammons never made a commercial recording of E J Moeran’s Violin Concerto, but Symposium has released a live radio performance of him playing it in 1946, just five years after it was written, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Adrian Boult. Sammons masters the expansiveness, exuberance and deep sadness of this radiant work. It is a showcase for Moeran’s genius as a composer – as is Boult’s account of his Symphony in G Minor (Lyrita), with the New Philharmonia Orchestra, recorded in 1973 when Boult was 84. The conductor has the energy of a man a third his age, especially in the relentless opening movement, said to have been inspired in part by Moeran’s fascination with the rhythm of express steam trains.
Boult had given the first performance of Holst’s Planets in 1918: but superbly restored is the recording of the work made in 1926 with Holst himself conducting (EMI). The sound is clear, but what is so overwhelming about it is that one is hearing the interpretation of this towering work by the man who wrote it.
John Barbirolli was, with Boult, the great champion of British music in the mid-20th century. For decades, his 1963 recording of Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (Warner Classics) has been hailed not just as the finest recording of that work, but one of the finest recordings ever made of any piece of music. Made in the middle of the night (to avoid traffic noise) in London’s Kingsway Hall, it exudes an almost sepulchral tone, alternating the celestial with the tense; I am amazed anyone else bothers to record it.