Hector Sandoval, Norma Fantini, Scott Hendricks, Tania Kross, and Rosalind Plowright star in this production of the Giordano opera performed by the Vienna Symphony, Bregenz Festival Chorus, and Prague Philharmonic Choir conducted by Ulf Schirmer.

As the 2011 Proms seasons rapidly approaches, this DVD whisks us back thirty seasons to two fine Proms given by Gennadi Rozhdestvensky and the BBC Symphony Orchestra which, by coincidence, also hail from a season exactly twenty seasons before my first teenage Promenade. That first taste of the Proms magic also featured the BBC Symphony in Russian classics and was to be conducted by another great Russian maestro, Yevgeny Svetlanov; alas, he was ill and died the following year and I never got to see him. Rozhdestzensky is still with us but, for some reason, only a very occasional visitor to the UK and more's the pity; in his excellent booklet notes, David Nice asks 'Is Gennadi Rozhdestvensky the greatest ever conductor of ballet scores?', and, on the evidence of this Nutcracker, which is ideally paced at every turn, it's hard to disagree.
 
Although proportioned something like a conventional concert programme, this selection of performances actually derives from two 1981 Proms, during Rozhdestvensky's relatively brief tenure as chief conductor of the BBC Symphony. The 2nd Act of the Nutcracker was filmed at the end of July and was preceded by a choral version of Mussorgsky's Night on Bare Mountain (the choir can be seen seated behind the orchestra during the Tchaikovsky), Prokofiev's Ugly Ducking and Scriabin's Prometheus. The Glinka items are extracted from a daring programme, mixing Viennese waltzes with double piano concertos, including Bartók's Concerto for two pianos and percussion. A punchy and swift performance of Glinka's Overture to Ruslan and Lyudmila opens the programme, followed by three wonderful dances from his opera A Life for the Tsar, the second of which has an energetically skipping rhythmic quality and which I recall fondly from its use in the climactic ball sequence from Alexander Sokurov's film Russian Ark, a remarkable single-take trawl through Russian history.
 
One of the advantages of seeing rather than merely hearing a performance such as this is the chance it affords to study the conductor's technique, and Rozhdestvensky's manner throughout the programme is minimal but precisely calibrated. The camera frequently cuts to an inert Rozhdestvensky, apparently doing nothing at all, but he is the master of conveying a world of meaning with a raised eyebrow and his hands can suggest a sculptor at work when he wishes. As already noted, tempos are perfectly judged in the Tchaikovsky, treading a fine line between grandeur and excitement and the BBC Symphony Orchestra's playing is every bit as plush and lively as one would expect from a Russian orchestra. Rozhdestvensky's speeds are adjusted for the concert hall: some of them would be tricky to dance to, such as a sweeping but forward driving Pas de deux (The Prince and the Sugar Plum Fairy). It's only a shame that we couldn't have the complete ballet; Rozhdestvensky in the full score does appear on a pricey Melodiya set (MELCD1000665), but it's terrific to have at least half and it's a performance I can imagine returning to often.
 
-- Andrew Morris, MusicWeb International


Gennadi Rozhdestvensky at the BBC Proms
Mikhail GLINKA (1804-1857)
Ruslan and Lyudmila – Overture [5:53]
Three Dances from A Life for the Tsar [16:27]
Pytor Ilyich TCHAIKOVSKY (1840-1893)
The Nutcracker – Act 2 [42:40]
BBC Symphony Orchestra/Gennadi Rozhdestvensky
rec. 27 July 1981 (Tchaikovsky), 14 August 1981 (Glinka), Royal Albert Hall, London
Producer (original broadcast): Rodney Greenburg
Picture format: 4:3/NTSC
Sound: Ambient Mastering/LPCM Stereo
Region: 0 (worldwide)

Start in the old town of Kashgar, where the tomb of Abakh Khoja contrasts with the busy city life of Urumqi. From strange rock formations in the countryside, to the alpine scenery of Kanas Lake and the fertile vineyards of Grape Valley.

Classical Music

This is an audio-only (i.e., with no video content) Blu-ray disc playable only on Blu-ray players.

In these recordings from Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall in Baltimore, Dvo?ák’s most darkly dramatic and passionate symphony, the Seventh, is coupled with his Eighth, notable for its dramatic contrasts, Bohemian lyricism, and a seemingly spontaneous flow of thematic ideas. ‘Alsop’s Baltimore orchestra parades a refined tonal profile that pays its own special dividends…Alsop should please both the eager newcomer…and the seasoned collector. There’ll be no disappointment on either score.’ (Gramophone) ‘This splendidly recorded performance [Symphony No. 7] stands very high among available readings.’ (BBC Music Magazine)

Sound format: PCM Stereo / DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1

4 SYMPHONIES • Thomas Dausgaard, cond; Danish Natl SO • C MAJOR 710508 (DVD: 168:00) Live: Copenhagen 2009

BRAHMS Symphony No. 1. DVO?ÁK Symphony No. 9. SIBELIUS Symphony No. 5. NIELSEN Symphony No. 3

If, as I did, you were to begin your examination of this release with disc 1, track 1 (the Brahms symphony), you might well conclude that there was little need to continue. There is something rather too cool and casual about Dausgaard’s interpretation of this powerful music. It lacks inner tension. There is not enough contrast between ideas. Accents are in the wrong places. Short notes are cheated of their value. And that’s not all. The second movement just plods on, the third is charmless, the fourth frantic and lurches from one tempo change to the next. Listening to the complete symphony several times could not induce me to alter my initial unfavorable observations. Adding visual insult to aural injury, sight and sound are not synchronized, and the difference between the two is disturbing, to put it mildly.

But then came the Nielsen symphony. What a difference! Right from the opening moments it had all the vigor and élan and determination lacking in the Brahms. Rhythms were tight and crisp. The music bristled with enthusiasm and commitment. The finale positively beamed with Elgarian nobility and breadth, rising to an absolutely thrilling climax. What a joy! Nielsen’s Third had hitherto never been one of my favorite symphonies, but Dausgaard nearly made it so in this performance.

Does Dausgaard work his magic on the two remaining works as well? The answer, I’m glad to say, is yes. Furthermore, the synchronization problem that affected the Brahms symphony is only minimal in the Nielsen and nonexistent in Dvo?ák and Sibelius. The “New World” Symphony receives one of the finest performances I have heard. Dausgaard’s approach is no romantic wallow but rather a clean, purposeful traversal filled with taut rhythms, precise attacks and releases, glowing sound, and architectural strength. Dausgaard likewise makes a strong case for the Sibelius Fifth, never allowing momentum to sag, carefully propelling the music forward with masterly control. I am particularly impressed with the ease in which he handles the tempo change for the second part of the first movement. By the time the grand climax of the finale arrives, one feels a great journey has been completed.

All four performances were recorded live in Copenhagen’s Koncerthuset in 2009. The personnel changes from symphony to symphony, but both principal horns, both principal trumpets, and both timpanists are star players. Generally the woodwinds are excellent, but violins seem a bit thin for an orchestra that is otherwise so assured and well balanced. However, the basses make up for this deficiency with their huge, rich sound, heard at its best at the quiet endings of three of the Brahms movements and in some of the more powerful moments of the Dvo?ák symphony. Aside from the basses, the orchestra plays with a bright sound, textures are clear and clean, balances are well controlled.

The camerawork is devoted about 20 percent of the time to Dausgaard and his facial contortions, 10 percent to views of the full orchestra from afar, and 70 percent to the business of jerking the viewer’s eyes from one instrumental close-up to another—two seconds of a horn player’s embouchure, a second of flute keys, two notes from the timpani, etc. Who determined that this is what we want to see? I find it annoying to the point where I simply can’t bear to watch.

On ArkivMusic the price for these four symphonies is $27 ($40 for the Blu-ray version)—just under $7 a symphony, a good buy even without the inferior Brahms symphony, especially for performances as fine as the other three.

FANFARE: Robert Markow

This is an audio-only (i.e., with no video content) Blu-ray disc playable only on Blu-ray players.

Szymanowski’s Symphony No. 3 ‘Song of the Night’ creates a potent atmosphere of Persian mysticism in its rich blend of voices and exotic orchestration. His Symphony No. 4 is largely extrovert in character and has a prominent rôle for piano. Symphonies Nos. 1 and 2 can be found on NBD0021. The CD release of Symphony No. 3 was Gramophone Editor’s Choice and given 5 STARS by ClassicFM (8.570721), and Symphony No. 4 an ‘unbeatable’ 10/10 from ClassicsToday.com ( 8.570722); the complete cycle acclaimed as ‘revelatory’ (ClassicalCDReview.com).

Reviews of the CD versions of these recordings

"Antoni Wit almost always can be relied on to deliver very thoughtful, beautifully musical, even inspired results, and there's no question that he conducts these works extremely well. The performances of both symphonies have a confidence and warmth about them that bespeaks a thorough understanding of Szymanowski's richly textured idiom. The Song of the Night (a.k.a. Symphony No. 3) has many of the same qualities that made Wit's Mahler Eighth so special: terrific choral singing, a bigness of conception that never precludes physical excitement, and very natural balances between vocal and instrumental forces."
--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

"As previous issues in this series have shown, when Antoni Wit and his forces are in top form in the music of Szymanowski, they're pretty much unbeatable...The performance of the Symphonie Concertante, one of Szymanowski's greatest works, is superb. Pianist Jan Krzysztof Broja plays the solo part beautifully. He's got the chops for the big moments in the outer movements, but it's his delicacy at the start of the central andante that's most memorable. Wit, typically, directs the orchestra with remarkable clarity as well as power. The finale in particular never has sounded less "clogged" texturally, while the very natural engineering always leaves plenty of room for the sound to expand and fill the hall at those ecstatic climaxes that are such a hallmark of this composer. A splendid release!"
-- David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

Also available on Blu-ray

Based on a Romantic tragedy by Zacharias Werner, Attila is set in the 5th century AD. The opera takes as its starting point Attila’s plans to storm Rome with his army of Huns and the Roman’s attempts to prevent him. As with Nabucco and I Lombardi, Verdi spiced up the action with a number of patriotic choruses, guaranteeing that – against the background of the Italian movement for unification – the opera was a great success.

Giuseppe Verdi
ATTILA

Attila – Giovanni Battista Parodi
Ezio – Sebastian Catana
Odabella – Susanna Branchini
Foresto – Roberto de Biasio
Aldino – Cristiano Cremonini
Leone – Zyian Atfeh

Parma Teatro Regio Chorus and Orchestra
(chorus master: Martino Faggiani)
Andrea Battistoni, conductor

Pier Francesco Maestrini, stage director
Carlo Salvi, set and costume designer
Bruno Ciulli, lighting designer

Recorded live from the Teatro Verdi di Busseto, 2010

Bonus:
- Introduction to Attila

Picture format: NTSC 16:9
Sound format: PCM Stereo / DTS 5.1
Region code: 0 (worldwide)
Subtitles: Italian, English, German, French, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Japanese
Booklet notes: English, French, German
Running time: 118 mins (opera) + 10 mins (bonus)
No. of DVDs: 1 (DVD 9)

R E V I E W:

VERDI Attila • Andrea Battistoni, cond; Giovanni Battista Parodi ( Attila ); Sebastian Catana ( Ezio ); Susanna Branchini ( Odabella ); Roberto De Biasio ( Foresto ); Cristiano Cremonini ( Uldino ); Zyian Atfeh ( Leone ); Teatro Regio di Parma O & Ch • C MAJOR 721608 (DVD); 721704 (Blu-ray) (118:00 + 10:00) Live: Busseto 10/2010


Attila (1846) was Verdi’s ninth opera, preceding Macbeth by almost exactly one year. It had a slow start, but became quite popular through the 1860s, after which interest in it began to diminish. Though not again a repertory piece, it has had a number of modern revivals and there are a number of recordings of it.


Its libretto is a bit confused, almost certainly because the writer of the first part, Temistocle Solera, departed for Spain before he had finished and Francesco Maria Piave was recruited to finish it. Solera and Piave had almost opposing ideas of what an opera libretto was and so, what some have called the “oratorio” style of Solera ends in the more enclosed style of Piave. Its two principal characters, however, Attila and Odabella, his captive, wife, and assassin, are drawn with some force.


Briefly, the Huns arrive at the gates of Rome and Odabella, whose father the Huns have killed, is brought in and announces how brave she is and Attila, impressed, strikes off her chains and gives her his sword. The Roman general Ezio arrives and offers Attila the entire empire if he will just leave Rome alone. Attila refuses and we meet Foresto, who is leading a band of refugees from the Huns. This is the easy part, and it’s all in the prologue. After framing the situation and the characters, we might expect that there would be a series of actions which might cause something to happen. What we get is a series of arias and duets, with occasional choral support, in which the principals either talk about what they are going to do or bemoan the fact that things have gone badly. This dramatic stasis is brought to an end only just before the final curtain, when Odabella kills Attila. That leaves the music.


This is good Verdi. If it doesn’t have the edge of, say, Traviata , or the power of Otello , there are many good moments. Yet, one of the interesting things about it is that it is fairly even all the way through. Though each of the principals gets at least one big musical moment, there is none that overpowers the others, though Ezio’s lament over Rome comes close.


This production comes from the Teatro Verdi in Busseto, Verdi’s hometown. The theater was opened in 1868, but Verdi apparently never set foot in it. Though he gave money to finish its construction, he called it “small, indecent, and almost unusable.” Nonetheless, Toscanini conducted many of Verdi’s operas in it, and Riccardo Muti and Plácido Domingo have also led Verdi there. It has been thoroughly restored and is a shining jewel, with one huge drawback. It is absolutely tiny. Its main floor and three balconies can seat in total 300 people. How Franco Zeffirelli managed to put Aida into it in 2002, I cannot imagine.


As one can imagine, the space constraints on the stage are considerable, and the director, Pierfrancesco Maestrini, has opted for one high-tech solution, a bare stage with a bit of a hump on one side and films projected onto the screen at the back. For some reason, though, Attila makes his first entrance descending from the flies on a platter. There is almost no space to move around much and the singers mostly just stand, or recline on the helpful hump. Maestrini has one bizarre convention in the arias with cabalettas, during which the singer rushes off the stage after the first verse only to rush on again for the second. Oddly, perhaps just because the director cannot do much on this stage, he is forced to let the singers be singers.


It sounds as if I did not like this production, but that is not the case, for the singing is well done. If this is a sample of the current state of singing in provincial Italian opera houses, then opera in Italy is in good shape, indeed. Susanna Branchini is a fine and spirited Odabella and she always gets the fires going (and she has a lot of fires to keep going, which may be why she and not Attila is on the cover). The Attila of Giovanni Battista Parodi is good without being particularly exciting. Ezio has almost nothing to do, but his aria, “Dagl’immortali vertici,” is a fine one and Sebastian Catana was generously applauded. The conductor, Andrea Battistoni, kept the small orchestra moving along, though I wished there could have been a bit more energy now and then. All of this said, there was an evenness about this production that I appreciated.


This DVD is one part of a project called “Tutto Verdi,” apparently centered in Parma, to publish visual recordings of all of Verdi’s operas by the end of this (Verdi) year. It is of at least passing interest, therefore, to ask how many operas Verdi actually wrote. The surveys by Roger Parker and Julian Budden insist there are 28: The “Tutto Verdi” project asserts there are only 26. The disagreement comes over the status of Stiffelio , which Verdi reworked as Aroldo , and Jérusalem , his reworking for Paris of I lombardi . The project has apparently decided not to include Aroldo and Jérusalem (for both of which ArkivMusic tells me there is a DVD). As near as I can tell, of the 26, four have previously been reviewed here ( Ernani , James Miller, 29:6; Macbeth , Raymond Tuttle, 31:2; Otello , James A. Altena, 34:1; and Forza , Bill White, 35:6).


As I write, there are two other DVDs of Attila available, under Santi (Kultur) and Muti (Opus Arte), and one coming, under Sangiorgi (Dynamic). I have seen none of these. Of the CD versions, I rather like that under Muti (EMI), where Samuel Ramey brings Attila into his own. (NB: This is not the same performance as in Muti’s DVD.)


FANFARE: Alan Swanson

Gunter Wand conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

William Steinberg conducts the Boston Symphony Orchestra. This rare material, filmed in color, represents some of the earliest televised concerts with of Steinberg with the BSO, restored using the greatest care and state-of-the-art techniques.

The eccentric and reclusive conductor Carlos Kleiber has achieved cult status in music circles and has built a loyal fan base. I Am Lost to the World tries to uncover some of the mysteries surrounding the maestro, such as: what were the real reasons he cancelled so often? The film sheds light on his relationships with his family, traces the developments of his career and covers the "mythologizing" that began during the maestro's lifetime. It includes never-before-seen film footage and interviews with Ricardo Muti, Otto Schenk, Dr. Otto Staindl (friend and attending physician of Carlos Kleiber), members of the Vienna Philharmonic, the Munich Philharmonic and the Berlin Philharmonic.

Director Georg Wübbolt
Running Time Total: 60 minutes
Picture Format: 16:9
Audio Format: PCM Stereo
Subtitles: English, French, Spanish, Japanese

The Summer Night Concert of the Vienna Philharmonic is the world's biggest annual classical open-air concert that takes place in the magical setting of the Sch�nbrunn Palace Baroque park in Vienna. This year marks the first time that Maestro Tugan Sokhiev will conduct the Summer Night Concert. The vocal soloist is world-renowned tenor Piotr Beczala, who will perform three iconic arias from: Georges Bizet's Carmen, Giacomo Puccini's Turandot and Emmerich K�lm�n's Gr�fin Mariza. With this open-air concert in Sch�nbrunn, the Vienna Philharmonic wishes to provide all Viennese, as well as visitors to the city, with a special musical experience in the impressive setting of Sch�nbrunn Palace and it's beautiful baroque gardens, a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site. Since 2004 the Vienna Philharmonic has provided an outstanding experience for the audience. The focus of this year's program is on well-known melodies from opera and operetta that lead us on a musical journey through various European landscapes und milieus.

Classical Music

Also available on Blu-ray

Three years after the creation of Médée, Krzysztof Warlikowski and Christophe Rousset were together again at La Monnaie for the revival of one memorable production whose staging reinforces the violence, tension and cruelty of this tragedy.

Whilst this work by Cherubini is considered part of the 'opéra-comique' genre, it is only due to the presence of spoken dialogue, which has been modernised here in the Polish stage director's interpretation.

Written in 1797, Cherubini's faithful version of Euripides' ancient tragedy is one of the most savage and powerful works of the opera repertoire, relating the cruel vengeance of a wounded woman for whom infanticide seems to be the only solution to her humiliation in love. As a continuation of Gluck's music, Cherubini's work is of boundless emotion, at once a refined, terrifying and desperate portent of a tragic outcome.

The cast : Nadja Michael as Médée, Kurt Streit as Jason, Christianne Stotijn as Néris Médée’s slave, Vincent Le Texier as King Créon and Hendrickje Van Kerckhove as Dircé Créon’s daughter. Christophe Rousset is conducted Les Talens Lyriques and the Chœurs de la Monnaie.

Director: Stéphane Metge
Length: 138 min - Image: Color, 16/9, NTSC
Audio: PCM Stereo, DTS HD Master Audio 5.1
Subtitles: French / English / German / Dutch
No. of Discs: 2

NINTH SYMPHONY BY MAURICE BEJART - ON SCHILLER'S

BEETHOVEN VIOLIN CONCERTO & SYMPHONY NO 6 PASTORAL

Also available on Blu-ray

Stravinsky in Hollywood, a film by Michael Capalbo, tells the story of an "old school" European artist knocking heads with the brash New World. The documentary uses a combination of existing archival footage (some never before seen), interviews with Stravinsky and his assistant Robert Craft, and premieres several big studio film scenes of the 40s with music Stravinsky wrote for them.

This Blu-ray Disc is only playable on Blu-ray Disc players and not compatible with standard DVD players.

Also available on standard DVD

Richard Wagner’s Tannhauser, a tale of the struggle between spiritual and profane love, and of redemption through love, is given a radical visual update in Sebastian Baumgarten’s controversial Bayreuth production. • Joep van Lieshout’s giant installation ‘The Technocrat’ dominates the stage, its industrial interior suggesting that Tannhäuser is in fact one big experiment. • Torsten Kerl interprets the title role, with Camilla Nylund in the role of Elisabeth. • ‘‘Camilla Nylund’s Elisabeth and Kwangchul Youn’s Landgraf deservedly received the most applause at the curtain calls.’’ (Bachtrack)

Richard Wagner
TANNHÄUSER

Hermann / Landgrave of Thuringia - Kwangchul Youn
Tannhäuser - Torsten Kerl
Wolfram von Eschenbach - Markus Eiche
Walther von der Vogelweide - Lothar Odinius
Biterolf - Thomas Jesatko
Heinrich der Schreiber - Stefan Heibach
Reinmar von Zweter - Rainer Zaun
Elisabeth / The Landgrave’s niece - Camilla Nylund
Venus - Michelle Breedt
A Young Shepherd - Katja Stuber

Bayreuth Festival Chorus and Orchestra
(chorus master: Eberhard Friedrich)
Axel Kober, conductor

Sebastian Baumgarten, stage director
Joep van Lieshout, set designer
Nina von Mechow, costume designer
Franck Evin, lighting designer

Recorded live at the Bayreuth Festival, July 2014

Bonus:
- Interviews with Sebastian Baumgarten, Axel Kober, Eberhard Friedrich, Torsten Kerl and Camilla Nylund
- Short films
- Cast gallery

Picture format: 1080i High Definition
Sound format: LPCM 2.0 / DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
Region code: 0 (worldwide)
Subtitles: English, French, German, Korean
Running time: 252 mins (opera) + 30 mins (bonus)
No. of Discs: 2 (BD 50)

Region: 0 (all region)
Format: NTSC, Digital 2.0, 5.1 / DTS 5.1, Aspect Ratio 16:9
Run Time 61:27
Booklet notes in English and Chinese

Also available on Blu-ray

Despite the limitations of life in his Salzburg birthplace - and the patronage of a new and somewhat unsympathetic Prince-Archbishop - opportunities nevertheless presented themselves to Mozart. Following a commission for Il re pastore in 1775, he wrote a sequence of violin concertos that reveal his own performer’s understanding of the instrument. The concertos are suffused with elegance and refinement and charged with vivacity and wit. His mastery of solo violin cantilena is matched by prodigious melodic invention and moments of exotic colour, such as the Turkish episode in the Rondeau finale of K.219.

The places visited include St Petersburg, Peter the Great's new westward-looking capital, and the traditional capital, Moscow. In Ukraine we see Odessa with the famous Potemkin Steps and something of the surrounding countryside of a region that for long offered holiday resorts to those living in Moscow or St Petersburg.

Masterworks Wiener Philharmoniker & Yannick N�zet-S�guin Neujahrskonzert 2026 / New Year'S Concert 2026 / Concert Du Nouvel An 2026. For the first time, Yannick N�zet-S�guin will take the podium at the Vienna Philharmonic's New Year's Concert. The Canadian conductor, who has long been associated with the orchestra, is the Music Director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York and the Philadelphia Orchestra. In the Golden Hall of the Vienna Musikverein, he will present, alongside popular pieces such as "Roses from the South" and the "Fledermaus Quadrille", five new works being performed there for the first time - including compositions by the American Florence Price (1887-1953) and Josephine Weinlich (1848-1887), who founded Europe's first women's orchestra. The New Year's Concert is one of the biggest events in classical music; it is broadcast to over 150 countries and reaches more than 150 million viewers.

The annual New Year's Concert in Vienna has been a major event for more than eight decades, since 1939, broadcast on television and radio. The concert has so far been conducted by world-famous maestros such as Herbert von Karajan, Lorin Maazel, Claudio Abbado, Carlos Kleiber, Zubin Mehta, Riccardo Muti, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Seiji Ozawa, Mariss Jansons, Franz Welser-M�st, Gustavo Dudamel, and others. As Austria's musical ambassadors, the Vienna Philharmonic sends people around the world a New Year's greeting in the spirit of hope, friendship, and peace - with lively and carefree yet nostalgic and profound music from the great repertoire of the Strauss family and their contemporaries.

VAUGHAN WILLIAMS Symphony No. 8. Job • Adrian Boult, cond; London PO • ICA ICAD 5037 (DVD: 73:05) Live: London 12/10/1972

To my knowledge, this is the first time this entire concert has been issued intact. Previously the Eighth Symphony appeared on a DVD (now out of print) with a performance from a concert eight months earlier of the Beethoven Violin Concerto with these same forces and violinist Nathan Milstein. That disc was given a very tepid review by Jerry Dubins in Fanfare 31: 1, criticizing the Beethoven as “off skew” due to intonation lapses by Milstein and lack of proper synchronization between the audio and visual tracks, and a “solid but less than rafter-ringing” rendition of the Eighth Symphony. Here the symphony opens the concert, given to mark the centenary of the composer’s birth. While I would agree that it does not equal Boult’s own studio recording with the same orchestra for EMI made almost four years before, it is still an estimable reading in Boult’s distinctive style, which in this particular work is far more low-key and introspective than in the hands of some other conductors. A significant factor in the lesser degree of impact is the recorded perspective, which is rather distant; even turning up the volume knob on my stereo receiver could not give it a presence equal to the studio version. A remarkable feature is that this performance differs notably in conception from that set down by EMI, as can be seen by the respective timings—11:09, 3:55, 8:35, and 4:44 for the studio account versus 10:44, 4:11, 7:26, and 5:47 here, with the 10:44 of the first movement including almost a minute of introductory applause. The change in proportions—significantly faster in the first and third movements, and markedly slower in the fourth—gives the piece a rather different feel, though even after several hearings I am not sure how to describe it, as the variations between the two do not follow a consistent pattern. That there is a substantial difference is a sufficient point of interest in and of itself for admirers of this conductor’s art.

With Job the competition between the 1970 EMI studio version and this live performance is much closer; the overall timings and conceptions of the two are virtually identical, and here the live performance has more presence. This video version does offer one advantage its studio counterpart lacks; at the start of each section, it displays for several seconds the corresponding (and striking) drawings from William Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job that inspired the composer. Boult had a unique and authoritative association with this work; in 1934 the composer dedicated the work to him, and he made four studio recordings of it before any other conductor made even one. That alone would make this an invaluable historical document; that value is increased by the fact that, apart from the aforementioned Beethoven concerto and a Beethoven romance for violin and orchestra with Yehudi Menuhin, this disc contains what are to my knowledge the only commercially released filmed performances of the man who ranks alongside Thomas Beecham as one of the two greatest British conductors of the last century.

The film quality itself is excellent for its vintage; images and colors are as sharp and clear as the analog film technology of the periods allows, and there are no signs of film deterioration. Camerawork is discreet, appropriate in focus, and free from the jittery itch of some current film producers to jump about every few seconds. Boult himself, 83 at the time, comes on stage slowly but not at all stiffly. Like Charles Munch he favors a fishing-pole length baton, but unlike the French maestro his movements are restrained, economical, and graceful rather than feverishly energetic, the very image of English patrician nobility. But do not mistake a lack of theatrical demonstrativeness for artistic dullness; this is music-making of great integrity and conviction. To fans of Vaughan Williams and Boult alike, this release is unhesitatingly recommended, particularly for the fine account of Job.

FANFARE: James A. Altena