Two Views of Britten's 'Ceremony of Carols'

Benjamin Britten

Benjamin Britten wrote his A Ceremony of Carols in 1942, for boys' voices and harp. Today we have two recordings of this gorgeous work, from two distinguished choirs - the women's voices of the Robert Shaw Chorale and the Choir of St. John's College, Cambridge.

The St. John's Choir, led by George Guest, also includes Britten's Rejoice in the Lamb and Missa Brevis. Shaw fills out his disc - or rather leads it - with Poulenc's Mass in G.

The Choir of St. John's College, Cambridge

Britten had a well-known antipathy for the cultured singing such as produced the more famous ensemble at Cambridge, the Choir of King's College Chapel. (That did not deter King's from recording the work, however.)

The critic Edward Greenfield characterized the singing of the Københavns Drengekor, which the composer conducted in a 1953 recording, as "tough." He was, however, impressed with the St. John's version: "[T]ime after time in my comparisons I have been delighted by the extra responsiveness of the St. John’s singing. The Danish boys may just outshine St. John’s in the jazzy rhythms of 'Deo Gracias' or in the Orff-like narration of the same carol, but the word-pointing and the contrasts of tone and dynamic are far better controlled throughout by the Cambridge boys and the crescendo at the end is over-whelming," he wrote in The Gramophone.

Britten may have been less pleased. The Decca Discography contains this parenthetical note: "Following publication, the composer requested a re-make of incorrect passages, which was done on 8 Aug 66 and that version was used for subsequent copies." I believe the transfer here is from the revised version. The original recording sessions were in December 1964.

George Guest

My own view is that this record is a fine achievement, not just for the Ceremony of Carols, but for the Missa Brevis and Rejoice in the Lamb. The Welsh conductor George Guest (1924-2002) led the St. John's Choir from 1951-91, greatly enhancing its international reputation.

Marisa Robles

I believe this may have been the first recording for the harpist Marisa Robles. Greenfield presciently predicted a great career for her, which has been the case.

This performance benefits from atmospheric stereo from St. John's.

LINK to the St. John's disc

The Robert Shaw Chorale

Robert Shaw must have liked A Ceremony of Carols. He recorded it twice for RCA Victor (in 1949 and 1964) and for Telarc (in 1997).

In 1949, Victor apparently did not have high hopes for the Britten work - the LP cover subordinates his composition to Poulenc's Mass in G.

Britten wrote A Ceremony of Carols for a boys' choir, but Shaw recorded it with six women's voices from his chorale. Not all critics were pleased. Irving Kolodin wrote in the Saturday Review, "1t is heartening to see the appreciation of a good work, such as Britten’s 'Ceremony of Carols,' implemented by the vast resources of publicity and distribution possessed by RCA Victor. It is less heartening to observe a treatment which accords with the great American penchant for expediency (that is to say, the use of an available women’s choir, rather than the more desirable boys’ voices)."

Seventy-five years later, it is possible to admire the artistry of these singers and their conductor, while also noting that the recording presents little of the atmosphere that can be found in the St. John's performance - the ceremonial aspect is missing.

Laura Newell

The harp in this performance is played by the versatile Laura Newell, who has been heard here before in Debussy and as a member of the swing group The New Friends of Rhythm.

Francis Poulenc

Poulenc's Mass in G was the subject of extravagant praise from the critics of the day. The American Record Guide was overwhelmed: "This Mass, stark, bare, unadorned as it may be, in the fifteen minutes duration is as filled with the distilled essence of devotion, of genuine religious feeling as any of the full-length scores of the classical or baroque periods. 1 know of no unaccompanied work in the modern idiom that can approach it; one would have to travel as back as Palestrina for serious competition." I mostly hear the stark, bare, unadorned aspect of the work, although it is earnest and well performed here.

Victor's sound is typical of the time - clear and not very atmospheric.

LINK to the Robert Shaw Chorale disc

Note: I have uploaded quite a few of Shaw's recordings in the past. You can find them here - including his 1946 and 1952 Christmas albums.

'Carols of Today' from Distinguished British Composers

In 1965, the Oxford University Press commissioned new carols from 17 of Britain's best composers, publishing the works in a volume called Carols of Today. The following year, the Argo record label recorded 14 of the works for an LP given the same name.

Today's post is devoted to that very good album and the delightful or at least impressive compositions it contains. The composers and their carols follow:

• William Mathias (1934-92) - Wassail Carol, Op. 26, No. 1
• Benjamin Britten (1913-76) - Jesu, as Thou art our Saviour
• John Joubert (1927-2019) - A Little Child there is yborn, op. 48
• Richard Rodney Bennett (1936-2012) - The Sorrows of Mary
• Alun Hoddinott (1929-2008) - What Tidings, Op. 38
• Peter Racine Fricker (1920-90) - In Excelsis Gloria
• Nicholas Maw - (1935-2009) Balulalow
• Peter Wishart (1921-84) - Alleluya, A New Work is come on Hand
• John McCabe (1939-2015) - Coventry Carol
• Alan Rawsthorne (1905-1971) - The Oxen
• Gordon Crosse (1927-2021) - Laetabundus
• Peter Maxwell Davies (1934-2016) - Ave Plena Gracia
• Phyllis Tate (1911-87) - The Virgin and Child
• John Gardner (1917-2011) - The Shout - An Easter Carol

The performers were the Elizabethan Singers, a group formed and conducted by Louis Halsey. This was the third seasonal recording that the ensemble had recorded for Argo, following Sing Nowell in 1963 and Sir Cristemas in 1965. The Singers also produced a number of other LPs with Halsey and other conductors into the 1972. Halsey went on to form the Louis Halsey Singers, also active in the studios.

The soloists on this recording were soprano Susan Longfield, tenor Ian Partridge and bass Christopher Keyte, all highly accomplished, as was Simon Preston, one of Britain's best known organists.

Simon Preston, Louis Halsey, Susan Longfield

While all the composers represented have passed on, Halsey, Partridge and Keyte are still with us. The sadly short-lived Susan Longfield died at age 35, and Simon Preston passed away earlier this year.

The music represents a few generations of composers from Alan Rawsthorne, Phyllis Tate and Benjamin Britten to John McCabe, Richard Rodney Bennett and others born in the 1930s. Those who have heard my recent posts of Britten and William Mathias will know of the expressive quality of their choral music; the others are of a similar standard. The three composers who contributed to the Oxford book of carols but who were not represented on the record are Imogen Holst, David Blake and Adrian Cruft.

Not all these compositions are Christmas carols: those of Richard Rodney Bennett and John Gardner were written for Easter. The settings are of generally of texts from the 11th to 16th centuries, with the exception of a Thomas Hardy setting and a 20th century text by Adam Fox, onetime Oxford professor of poetry and later Canon of Westminster Abbey.

The download includes scans and texts, as usual. The excellent recording comes from Holy Trinity Church in Kensington.

The cover above is one of the many that Arthur Wragg executed for Argo. Another cover for a Christmas disc, from the Choristers of Ely Cathedral, can be found on this blog. There are several other designs for choral music LPs and an extensive series for Shakespeare's plays. I'll post a link to my collection of these soon. The Carols of Today cover would seem to have been more influenced by the art of the French painter Georges Rouault than Wragg's other covers.

Previn Conducts Britten's Spring Symphony

My recent upload of William Mathias' This World's Joie was surprisingly popular. Mathias had at least two inspirations - the Vaughan Williams choral works that have appeared in this series (notably Hodie and Sancta Civitas) and in particular Benjamin Britten's brilliant Spring Symphony from 1949.

Britten himself led the first commercial recording of the work in 1960, but today we have a transfer of André Previn's 1978 reading, beautifully performed and recorded. It has been a favorite of mine since it was issued. This transfer is from an original EMI Electrola pressing.

André Previn and Benjamin Britten in 1976

As with the other recordings in this series of choral works, this production offers some of the finest artists then active in Britain - soprano Sheila Armstrong, contralto Janet Baker and tenor Robert Tear. Previn conducted the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus and the St. Clement Danes Boys' Choir.

The recording also is notable for its superb late-analogue sound, as derived from Kingsway Hall by producer Christopher Bishop and engineer Michael Sheady. To pick one example, I like the way the important tuba part is notably clear while remaining part of the ensemble. (Edward Greenfield in his Gramophone review identified the tuba player as John Fletcher, who is not credited.)

Front: Janet Baker, Sheila Armstrong, Robert Tear. Rear: Christopher Bishop, André Previn 

Britten called the work a symphony, but it actually is a song cycle with texts chosen primarily from the 13th to 19th century - "Sumer is icumen in" through to John Clare. The 20th century is represented by "Out in the lawn I lie in bed" from W.H. Auden's 1933 poem A Summer Night. The Auden piece, sung by Janet Baker, takes up the central portion of Britten's work, which points up its ominous reference to "Where Poland draws her Eastern bow," adding, "Now ask what doubtful act allows / Our freedom in this English house / Our picnics in the sun." Greenfield notes, "Both Previn and Baker are children of the inter-war years, Previn in Berlin very immediately so."

The London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in Kingsway Hall

But the majority of the work is notably sunny, appropriate to one celebrating spring. "Previn goes farther [than Britten] in realizing the dramatic-evocative aspects of the work, as shown in the pointing of instrumental witticisms and the unrestrained enjoyment of the open-end cadenza or bird sounds in 'Spring, the sweet spring'," writes Richard Freed in the Stereo Review. "The overall effect is one of mystic fantasy, evoked to a degree that Britten did not attempt in his own recording." It is this atmosphere that makes the Previn recording such a source of delight.

Britten's music has appeared several times on this blog - vintage recordings of his Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge and A Simple Symphony are newly remastered.

1979 Gramophone ad

Malcolm Arnold First Recordings

Malcolm Arnold came to the public's attention in 1943 via his overture Beckus the Dandipratt, written while he was the principal trumpet of the London Philharmonic. The first recording of the work was led by Edward van Beinum in 1947, when that fine musician was the LPO's principal conductor. (I believe Arnold was still in the LPO at the time.) There would be no further recordings of Arnold's compositions until 1953. Then there would be several within a few years' time, many of which I've gathered for this post.

During this period, Arnold's music became known for its instrumental color, great contrasts and melody. Some critics even complained that he was not serious enough. That side of his personality would soon show itself, but today we are concerned with the brilliant works that made his reputation in the concert hall, most of them in their first recordings.

The post encompasses two LPs - one devoted to Arnold's music; the other split between Arnold and Benjamin Britten.

Symphony No. 2, Tam O'Shanter Overture

As with Beckus the Dandipratt, Arnold's Tam O'Shanter Overture quickly became popular after the composer conducted its premiere during the 1955 Proms season.

Two recordings quickly followed, one with the composer and the Philharmonia, the other with John Hollingsworth and the Royal Philharmonic. As far as I can tell, these sessions took place on the same day, September 19.

What makes it more unusual is that Arnold had devoted September 17 and 18 to recording Beckus and the Symphony No. 2 with the RPO for Philips. He then left the conducting of Tam O'Shanter to Hollingsworth while he motored across town to record the same work for UK Columbia.

Philips licensed the resulting recordings to US Epic, whose LP is the source of the current transfer. The wonderfully colorful cover illustration above depicts the legend of Tam O'Shanter, as set down by Robert Burns. After a night of revelry, Tam and his horse lose their way and encounter the ghouls depicted on the cover.

John Hollingsworth

This was just the sort of thing to spark Arnold's imagination (and empathy - he was a notorious carouser), and the overture is completely successful, especially in this beautifully recorded interpretation from the RPO and Hollingsworth, a fine conductor who was too little recorded.

But the most notable recording on the album was the first of any of Arnold symphonies - the Symphony No. 2, again a colorful and melodious work, well presented here by the composer and the RPO.

Arnold's conducting of Beckus the Dandipratt is everything one might wish; and again the performance and conducting are excellent.

Some critics were not fully satisfied, however. Writing in The Gramophone, critic and composer Malcolm MacDonald complained that "this constantly faultless presentation of an undeviatingly cheerful mood is perhaps becoming too much the exclusive province of Arnold's music." That would soon change, however; Arnold was to develop a pronounced dark side as a result of alcoholism and mental illness. One biography of him is subtitled "The Brilliant and the Dark," another "Rogue Genius."

Gramophone ad, December 1955

English Dances, Scottish Dances - Plus Britten-Rossini

Previously on this site, I've shared Adrian Boult's 1954 recording of Arnold's justly famous English Dances. Boult conducted the first performance of the first set of dances (there are two) in 1951, but did not record them until 1954.

Robert Irving

In the meantime, Robert Irving, music director of the Sadler's Wells Ballet, had recorded both sets for HMV in 1953 with the Philharmonia. These were released with the incongruous backing of the Les Sylphides ballet music, which made use of Chopin piano works in orchestrations by Roy Douglas.

In 1956, Kenneth MacMillan adapted the English Dances for his ballet Solitaire. Probably spurred by this, HMV reissued the Irving recordings in 1957 (mentioning the Solitaire connection on the cover), adding a new recording of Arnold's Scottish Dances, which the composer had just written for the BBC.

HMV's cover

The discmate for the Arnold works was more compatible this time: Britten's reworking of Rossini into the two suites, Matinées Musicales and Soirées Musicales. George Balanchine had used the music in his 1941 ballet Divertimento.

In the US, the HMV recordings were issued by Capitol, which trumpeted the Britten works on the cover, presumably because he was better known in America than Arnold.

Irving's conducting of the excellent Philharmonia is just fine, and the LP is very successful.

Throughout this period, Arnold was making a name in film music, as well. His scores for The Key, Trapeze and The Inn of the Sixth Happiness are available here.

As usual, the downloads include scans, photos and reviews. The Epic LP is from my collection. The Capitol album has been cleaned up from a lossless needle drop on Internet Archive.

Nikolai Sokoloff Conducts

Three music directors preceded George Szell to the Cleveland Orchestra podium. Two - Artur Rodziński and Erich Leinsdorf - have been represented here, but founding music director Nikolai Sokoloff has not. He is something of a forgotten figure, but the aural evidence is that he was a very good musician who quickly built the orchestra into a polished ensemble.

Today's program includes several of the recordings he made in Cleveland in 1924-28, along with one of the two LPs he produced with his La Jolla orchestra early in the 1950s.

Sokoloff in Cleveland

Sokoloff (1886-1965) was born in Kiev but resident in the US from his early teens. He studied at Yale and with Charles Martin Loeffler and Vincent d'Indy. In 1917, he was conducting San Francisco People’s Philharmonic Orchestra when Cleveland's Adella Prentiss Hughes came to call. Not long after, he became the founding director of the Cleveland Orchestra. Its first concert was in late 1918.

Nikolai Sokoloff and Adella Prentiss Hughes with an early example of a favorite publicity pose: "admiring the new record," in this case the 1812 Overture

It wasn't long before Brunswick records signed the orchestra. Its first effort - and the first recording in our set - was an abridged acoustic version of the "1812 Overture," made in New York in January 1924. It's a credible performance and well recorded for the time. Even then Sokoloff had developed a reputation for emotional performances, but this one is restrained, without the cannon blasts or other embellishments that have found their way onto later records. The orchestra is already a disciplined ensemble, as best as one can tell from the acoustic recording and altered instrumentation.

1926 ad

This impression is borne out by out next record - the Act III Prelude and Bridal Chorus from Wagner's Lohengrin. By this time (May 1926), Brunswick had moved on to electrical recording. It had, however, adopted the so-called GE "Light-Ray" method, which was inferior to the Western Electric process used by other companies. Mark Obert-Thorn, who has produced an edition of all Sokoloff's Cleveland recordings, wrote of the GE system, "At lower volume levels, the results could be acceptable; however, anything forte and above came out congested and harshly distorted." Actually, the sound on the Wagner discs is not nearly as bad as this might suggest, although inferior to other recordings of the time.

Also from these May 1926 sessions came Halvorsen's "Entry March of the Boyars." The sessions were held in the still-existing Masonic Auditorium, the orchestra's usual site in those pre-Severance Hall days. It was a good place for recording, also used by Decca-London for its Cleveland recordings during the Lorin Maazel years.

Masonic Auditorium

In November 1926, the orchestra became a pioneer in radio broadcasting with the first in a series of programs transmitted by Cleveland station WTAM and sponsored by the Medusa Cement Corp., both still in existence. While the broadcast is lost to time, I've included its program in the download.

Sokoloff's final Brunswick session, held in New York on May 8, 1928, was devoted to Sibelius' "Valse Triste" and the "Polovtsian Dances" from Borodin's Prince Igor. The Sibelius and one of the two Borodin discs are in the download.

Sokoloff's downfall in Cleveland was rooted both in music and manners. This selection of recordings demonstrate that he was a talented conductor and orchestra builder. He was, however, most inclined to the Romantic and contemporary composers. The latter put off the paying customers; his indulgent approach to the classicists and even Romantics tested the patience of some critics.

Meanwhile, relations with at least some members of the orchestra were strained. The download includes an 1926 Associated Press article reporting on an orchestra petition "charging Sokoloff with conduct unbecoming a gentleman." Such conduct apparently involved insulting the abilities and intelligence of some of the musicians. For his part, Sokoloff blandly observed, "The artists' contracts say they must do as I tell them."

These dust-ups apparently continued until the orchestra trustees didn't renew his contract in 1933.

Sokoloff's achievements in Cleveland are undeniable, however. Obert-Thorn has written that, "What we hear on these recordings is an ensemble that already sounds superior to most of its European counterparts at the time, save perhaps for Mengelberg’s Concertgebouw Orchestra." That is remarkable for an orchestra founded less than a decade before.

The download includes label scans and other ephemera, plus Obert-Thorn's discography of Sokoloff's recordings with the ensemble. 

Most of these recordings were remastered from lossless originals on Internet Archive, some of which have noisy surfaces. The 1812 Overture comes from a 1970s Cleveland Orchestra promotional LP.

You can find all Sokoloff's Brunswicks in Obert-Thorn's transfers on the Pristine Classical site. They include the first recording of Rachmaninoff's Symphony No. 2.

Editorial cartoon, circa 1926

New Music in La Jolla

Perhaps strangely, Sokoloff's next post after Cleveland was as the director of the New Deal's Federal Music Project. He then led the Seattle Symphony for a few years, and finally founded the Orchestra of the Musical Arts Society of La Jolla, in Southern California. There, he made his final recordings, for the small Alco company, of contemporary pieces by Norman Dello Joio, Benjamin Britten and Bohuslav Martinů.

Alice Mock in 1927

I've included his Britten-Martinů disc, recorded in 1950. The Martinů work is his delightful "Sinfonietta La Jolla," written for the ensemble and beautifully performed by its members. The Britten work is his settings of Rimbaud called "Les Illuminations." Here the work is sung by the little known but excellent Alice Mock, with sensitive backing by Sokoloff's orchestra. This may have been the first recording of the Britten.

Alco's recording quality is vivid, except for some strange balances and a cramped quality, both likely the fault of a too-small studio. The download includes complete scans and reviews from the New York Times, Saturday Review, High Fidelity, the American Record Guide and The New Records. I've also included texts and translations of the Rimbaud poetry.

Louis Kaufman in Vaughan Williams

I had a request for more recordings by the American violinist Louis Kaufman, who has appeared here before in the music of Delius, Barber and Robert Russell Bennett.

Louis Kaufman

Here is that artist in Vaughan Williams' seldom-heard "Concerto Accademico" of 1924-25. The work finds Kaufman in his usual driving form. The backing here is by the Radio Zurich Symphony under the Swiss conductor Clemens Dahinden, who made many records for this label, although usually with the Winterthur Symphony.

Victor Desarzens

The other side of this 10-inch LP from the 1950s also is of British music as performed by Swiss musicians. This time, it is Britten's Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, as assayed by the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra under its founder and long-time conductor, Victor Desarzens, who also often worked for Concert Hall Society and its offshoots.

Both performances and sound are worthy. These were probably the first recordings of these works outside the British Isles.

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.

Britten's Simple Symphony

It's amazing (and perhaps a little daunting) to read that Britten composed some of this material when he was as young as nine and assembled it into this delightful and memorable string symphony when he was 20.

Eugene Goossens

This recording from November 1953 was not the first of the piece. (Boyd Neel recorded it in 1939), but it is a very fine one led by composer-conductor Eugene Goossens, and one that evidently had he approval of Britten, who wrote the (also delightful) liner notes, which are included in the package.

The recording, made by John Culshaw and Kenneth Wilkinson in Decca's West Hampstead Studios in London, is excellent.

LINK (August 2025 remaster in ambient stereo)