Boult Conducts and Rehearses Britten

A break from the Christmas tunes - here we have some of Benjamin Britten's finest music in both performances and rehearsal by Sir Adrian Boult and the London Philharmonic.

The recordings were made in late 1956 by the American company Westminster in conjunction with the British Pye-Nixa. Included were the Four Sea Interludes and Passacaglia from Britten's Peter Grimes and his Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (a set of variations and fugue on a theme by Henry Purcell).

The latter was written for a 1946 educational film that was conducted and narrated by the urbane Malcolm Sargent (there's an excerpt on YouTube).

Westminster issued the Boult-LPO Young Person's Guide in two versions - with narration and without, and then for good measure added a rehearsal recording. I've gathered all these versions together for this post. In brief, we have the unnarrated Guide and Peter Grimes music in stereo (cover above) and the narrated Guide and rehearsal in mono (cover below).

The transition from mono to stereo recording provided some interesting experiments in recording, illustrated to a degree by the rehearsal recording. As producer Kurt List says in the liner notes, the seating arrangement used for his recordings "never coincides with concert seating; thus quite a different span of attention is required of the conductor and the orchestral musicians." List's practice was to spread the orchestra out and use multiple microphones, and then fix the balances in the control room. He then has the conductor do a run through and asks him to adjust the balances further. The rehearsal recording on this disk is in fact a session where List asks Boult to change balances for recording purposes.

The irony of asking a conductor who was noted for stressing clarity and balance to rebalance the music because you have exploded the usual seating arrangement and put microphones all over the hall apparently doesn't occur to List. But to be fair, the results are not bad, if not to my own taste, in both mono and stereo.

The Young Person's Guide is nicely done, even if Boult doesn't capture Britten's mock pomposity very well. The fugue is predictably wonderful. The Peter Grimes music is also beautifully rendered, and if the struggles seem external more than internal, that also may demonstrate the difference in temperament between conductor and composer.

As a bonus to this post, I've added a recording of the original Purcell theme (a rondeau from his Abdelazer theatre music) in a performance by the Bath Festival Orchestra and Yehudi Menuhin.