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Sir
Arnold Bax Website
EDITORIAL
July
23, 2007
Welcome Back Lyrita
What a
pleasure it is to welcome the
Del
Mar recording of Bax’s Sixth Symphony on Lyrita back to the
catalogue. I
suspect there are many who came to the Bax symphonies by way of this
landmark recording in the late 1960s and 70s when recordings of
Bax’s music were few and far between.
Handley’s recording of the Fourth Symphony on Revolution
preceded the Del Mar by nearly three years but its distribution was
limited (certainly outside the UK) and the wartime Barbirolli
recording of the Third Symphony on EMI was long out of print by 1967
when the Del Mar was issued. Graham
Parlett in his review of this disc on
this site recalls the thrill of hearing this recording when it was
new and says he experienced much of that same thrill again when
hearing it in its new CD mastering and despite the appearance of
four newer versions of the mighty Sixth Symphony in the past forty
years, Graham says the Del Mar remains his favorite.
Like most
middle-aged Baxians, I came to the Bax symphonies and tone poems
through the Lyrita recordings and honestly, I don’t think there
could have been a better introduction.
While the later Handley set on Chandos may improve on a few
of the Lyritas as far as interpretations are concerned, few of the
digital recordings can begin to match the analogue Lyritas in terms
of production and sound. Lyrita’s
owner, Mr. Richard Itter, spared no expense when it came to making
his recordings. He hired
Decca’s best sound engineers and he recorded
London
’s best orchestras in that greatest of all English recording
sites, the much-missed Kingsway Hall. The
combination of those three factors is what sets these Lyrita
recordings apart. Some
of the later Bax symphony recordings suffer from less-than-polished
playing or overly reverberant sound that detracted from the overall
performances. The
Handley Chandos set is obviously very well done technically but the
analogue Lyrita recordings are even richer and more transparent and
this new CD transfer of the Sixth has, if anything, even improved
upon the sound of the original by slightly adjusting the balances to
make the spotlighting less intrusive.
Itter was also very careful about choosing conductors for his
projects. While I’ve always regretted that Lyrita didn’t invite
Del
Mar to record more of the Bax symphonies, his selection of Myer
Fredman and Raymond Leppard to record two symphonies apiece was very
inspired. Fredman
delivers what is in my opinion still the single greatest recording
of a Bax symphony ever made (No. 2) while Leppard is magnificent in
both the majestic Fifth and the sublime Seventh. Lyrita has
announced that Fredman’s extraordinary Second will be released
with Leppard’s Fifth early next year and that will be another
must-have disc for every Baxian, young and old.
In the
meantime, we have this glorious new reissue of the Sixth to enjoy
that comes with several newer recordings by Vernon Handley of three
overtures and one delightful Irish miniature.
Of those works, one is a premiere recording (Work
in Progress) and the other (Overture
to Adventure) is leagues ahead in terms of execution of its only
other available recording. True,
the overtures come nowhere near to being Bax at his best but they do
display a side of his musical personality that we rarely get to see
– the pugnacious extrovert with the very dry wit. I can’t
imagine finer performances than those recorded here by Vernon
Handley.
So…a
most warm welcome back to the Norman Del Mar recording of the Sixth
and to the Lyrita catalogue in general.
Those of us who grew up collecting the Lyrita LPs know what
fantastic treasures they are and to those coming to the Lyritas for
the first time, they will serve as introductions to some truly
remarkable musical talent that we don’t hear so much from today
but who in their time were making recordings that have yet to be
surpassed....conductors like Myer Fredman, Nicholas Braithwaite, Sir
John Pritchard, Raymond Leppard – and perhaps above all, the late,
great Norman Del Mar
Richard
R. Adams
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