MOERAN Sinfonietta.1 D’INDY Jour d’été à la montagne.2 BERNERS The Triumph of Neptune3 • Thomas Beecham, cond; Royal PO;1,3 BBC SO2 • SOMM BEECHAM 24 (77:02) Live: London 4/26/1947;1 10/6/1951;2 11/10/19463

The earliest releases in “The Beecham Collection” were issued by The Sir Thomas Beecham Trust on its own label; since 2000, the enterprise has been managed by the British independent label, SOMM. With Beecham’s vast legacy of commercial recordings quite thoroughly documented on CD by EMI and various independent labels, it has been a pleasant surprise to find SOMM excavating more and more live material. The past several CDs have been mostly first issues; the back of the jewel box for this latest offering is labeled “Premier CD Release,” but I am not aware of any previous issue of any of these performances.

The most striking aspect of this program is the reminder it gives us of Beecham’s vast repertoire; he made commercial recordings of a quantity and variety of music probably unparalleled by any of his contemporaries, and yet the concert recordings being made available here and on other recent SOMM CDs show that even his prodigious studio discography fails to do justice to the sheer amount of music he conducted, and to his sheer capacity for hard work. Of the three composers represented here, Beecham never made a commercial recording of the first two; the Berners was clearly something of a favorite that he recorded twice, once with his London Philharmonic in 1937, and again with the Philadelphia Orchestra (a rare recording by that orchestra with a guest conductor) while on a U.S. and Canadian tour in 1952.

These three works have all stayed on the fringes of the repertoire, and almost exclusively in their home countries. Ernest J. Moeran’s (1894–1950) Sinfonietta, composed in 1944, is an enjoyable, energetic, and colorfully scored work, best-known from a Lyrita LP conducted by Sir Adrian Boult; there are currently three versions (not including the present one) listed on arkivmusic.com. This 1947 concert performance, judging from the sound, was taken from acetate discs; the sound is rather dim but listenable, and the colorful orchestration unfortunately loses much of its effect. There is, however, no question of Beecham’s command of the score.

According to the notes by the knowledgeable Graham Melville-Mason, Beecham first met Vincent d’Indy in 1905, the year Jour d’été was composed! Over the years, Beecham conducted five or so works by d’Indy, but this is the first documentation of his performance of any of them that I have encountered. This half-hour, programmatic work is lush and late Romantic; fortunately, the BBC’s source material (probably tape) is far better than that of the Moeran. Arkivmusic.com currently lists only two other recordings of this piece, one the EMI version by Pierre Dervaux originally on LP, and the other a new Chandos recording by Rumon Gamba (related to Pierino?) in what promisingly is labeled as Volume 1 of d’Indy’s orchestral works. (A second volume has just been issued as I write this in late May; it includes the Second Symphony, which I consider d’Indy’s masterpiece.)

Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson, Lord Berners (1883–1950) wrote his whimsical ballet, The Triumph of Neptune, in 1926; Beecham was its greatest advocate. He and his two-month-old Royal Philharmonic gave this spirited performance as the last piece on a 1946 program, the rest of which appeared on SOMM Beecham 19; the sound here is more vivid than I remember from that disc.

There may not be anything “indispensable” on this CD, but for admirers of Beecham it sheds additional light on some lesser-known aspects of his art. Perhaps the most prominent of these is this: they don’t make them like that anymore.

FANFARE: Richard A. Kaplan