"Arnold Overtures"Reference Recording RR-48 TAS/SEALED

$

225

This is a highly rated Audiophile Reference Recording #RR-48, titled "Arnold Overtures" with The composer himself conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra. These very fine recording were mastered by the great Prof. Johnson in a Pure Analog 33 1/3 recording. This particular recording was funded by TAS(The absolute Sound) and is SEALED.

ARTIST : MALCOLM ARNOLD

TITLE : Overtures

Side A :

A Sussex Overture (12:11)

Beckus the Dandipratt (10:45)

Side B & Side C

The Smoke (11:56)

The Fair Field (9:17)

Side D

1. Commonwealth

Christmas Overture (18:55)

Arnold Was born in 1921 and came to music through Sir Thomas Beecham’s early Delius Society recordings and through the trumpet playing of Louis Armstrong. Arnold took up the trumpet himself and became one of the most admired players of his generation. In 1943, at the age of 21, he joined the London Philharmonic Orchestra as principal trumpet and stayed with them on and off for about seven years before giving up playing to become a full-time composer.

He was a legendary performer. Stanley Woods, co-principal trumpet of the present-day LPO, told me it was hearing Arnold’s playing in Ernest Ansermet’s 1946 LPO recording of Stravinsky’s Firebird which inspired him to become a trumpet player himself. During his time to performer Arnold often played under Beecham whom he worshipped as a conductor and whose genius for creating a feeling of absorbed tranquility he has surely inherited. In fact when Arnold in due course took up conducting on a regular basis he earned almost as many plaudits for that as for the compositions he poured out year after year in an apparently ceaseless flow of inspiration (there are hardly any’ duds’). Famous instrumentalists like trumpeter Philip Jones and violinist Kenneth Sillito talk of performances of Berlioz (Symphonie fantastique) and Mozart (Symphony No. 29) respectively they gave under Arnold’s direction which, they claim, rank among the finest they ever experienced: which, coming from seasoned orchestral veterans, is no idle compliment.

Although weakened in recent years by a heart attack and other ailments, Arnold is still charismatic as a conductor. He is good to watch: clear beat, the arms describing wide semaphoric gestures, all the music’s important points tellingly underlined. In former years he was renowned for the kind of vitality born of hyperactivity. You can see it in action in some BBC footage from the late 1960s when he’s rehearsing some of Thomas Merritt’s music in Truro Cathedral, and on another occasion when he conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in a studio performance of his own Cornish Dances. He has always been, in my estimation, an unsurpassed conductor of his own music. I asked him once how he’d managed to achieve the spellbinding stillness at the eand of the Fifth Symphony’s slow movement when he recorded it with the CBSO in 1972 -- for me one of the great moments in his recorded legacy. He shrugged his shoulders. “You know the musicians,” was all he said. Like Beecham, Arnold listens intently and encourages players to play their own way, to express their own personalities. So it was during the sessions for the making of this album. In the Smoke, in Beckus and in the Commonwealth Christmas Overture tempos in some of the misterioso sections so seem slow as to bring the music almost to a standstill. Yet the result is, paradoxically, not loss but gain. A certain static quality, when for periods at a stretch nothing very much seems to be happening, has always been one of the most enigmatic and original features of Arnold’s music. And these passages, when charged with meaning and tension as they are here, change their character completely. They are magic. So are the extremes of dynamic he obtains: pianissimo is a whisper, fortissimo ear-splitting. (He complained once in an interview about what he regards as the present-day habit to “coast along at a comfortable mezzo-forte, nothing more, nothing less.”) “I don’t know how he does it,” said David Nolan (who led the LPO for these sessions) with engaging candor, “but do it he certainly does!” Arnold nowadays does the minimum of routine rehearsal and says hardly anything. He prefers to record complete ‘takes’ of works with a minimum of editorial ‘patching’; that way, the composer/conductor determines the overall shape and feel of the performance rather than the producer/editor. But in fact it’s not what he does or says that counts in this context, but who and what he is: one of the great musicians of the age.

This is a Very Rare recording and is highly regarded by analog lovers. It is a 2 Lp set with a gate-fold cover and in SEALED New condition.

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