Serenades

TESTAMENT is an artist-based label, not restricted to any period of recording history, and its issues are selected
from the archives of some of the largest record companies in the world.

It is a pleasure to welcome this excellent reissue on the Testament label of several important London Baroque Ensemble recordings from the early 1950s that first appeared on Parlophone 10- and 12-inch LPs. So what is it about these Parlophone tapes that makes them important for us? It is neither, I hasten to add, a sense of history, nor a nostalgic memento, recalling those heady youthful days of musical exploration.

In the first place, for many of these artists, and for the record companies, the music was new - in other words, it was rarely publicly performed and certainly not recorded - so there remains that almost indefinable but none the less tangible feeling of excitement about the playing when these players realized the greatness of the music they had in front of them. In the second place, every one of these 17 players was an absolute leader in their field. For example, the clarinettists here are Frederick Thurston, Jack Brymer, Gervase de Peyer and Basil Tchaikov, vastly experienced orchestral musicians who often played under some of the greatest conductors the world has ever known: Toscanini, Furtwängler, Beecham, Busch, Weingartner, de Sabata, Krauss, Boult, van Beinum, Karajan, Richard Strauss, Enescu (in no particular order) - these all appeared in London in the immediate pre- and post-war years. Such factors, allied to the brilliantly sympathetic direction of Karl Haas, combined to give us recorded performances second to none.

In this collection, the Mozart E flat and the Dvorák Serenades contain playing of outstandingly consistent quality, but at times I thought the C minor Serenade (One of Mozart's very greatest works), was not as fully revealed as it should be, and I was inter-mittently disturbed by an odd rumble during the Andante in this work. However, this CD is as fine a reissue of these recordings as it is possible to have. The notes by the late and much lamented Lionel Salter are equally valuable. Warmly recommended.

From a review by Robert Matthew-Walker International Record Review