Devoted to John Culshaw’s early years as a producer at Decca, this 12-CD set is an important piece of archive research and restitution, meticulously prepared and generously filled. Even aside from the set’s musical content, the 6000 words of background commentary by producer Dominic Fyfe help fill significant gaps left by Culshaw’s own bracing (and now sadly scarce) memoir, Putting the Record Straight, published posthumously in 1981.

One criterion for selection has been to avoid republishing the frequently republished. So no Ansermet, no van Beinum and no Erich Kleiber, though, importantly, there is here a reminder of Culshaw’s predictably high regard for George Szell. The principal aim has been to give a new lease of life to recordings which have languished too long in the archives. There are familiar names here, alongside less familiar ones whose work springs out, as from some musical jack-in-the-box, to astound, intrigue and delight.

The moment it was decided which form of long-playing record should be adopted, it was Decca who blazed the trail in June 1950 with a shrewdly planned mix of more than 50 titles. It was both a technical triumph and a commercial one, though like all pioneers, Decca had to cope with teething troubles tardier organisations could partly avoid.

The recordings themselves were mostly excellent; less so the vinyl pressings and the available reproducing equipment. We find veteran Gramophone reviewer Alec Robertson raging about the ‘banjo-like’ piano tone (pitch wavering) of Cortot pupil Jacqueline Blancard’s fine account of Schumann’s Op 12 Fantasiestücke. Philip Siney’s excellent new transfer may have involved some remedial work, but I doubt whether removing that banjo effect was part of it. How Culshaw must have shuddered at reviews such as this – or Robertson’s dismissal of cellist Zara Nelsova’s moving account of Ernest Bloch’s From Jewish Life with the composer himself at the piano – when the problems had little to do with the actual recordings.

Culshaw learned his trade sitting alongside engineering royalty, Decca’s Kenneth Wilkinson. He was there in October 1948 when the 24-year-old Culshaw produced Grace Williams’s enchanting Fantasia on Welsh Nursery Tunes with the LSO under composer-conductor Mansel Thomas; and he was still there at the peak of Culshaw’s fame and fortune for the recording of Britten’s War Requiem in 1963.

Among the musicians drawn to Decca in 1950 was the American composer, conductor and senior NBC radio producer in the Toscanini years, Don Gillis. He’d arrived in London to make this technically sensational recording of his Portrait of a Frontier Town, a roistering and atmospheric five-movement tone poem which sounds like a rip-off of Copland’s Rodeo but actually predates it. That, too, got a terrible drubbing in Gramophone, though for a very different reason: snobbery about such music in the upper reaches of the classical musical establishment. Little wonder that Culshaw – ‘iconoclast and visionary’ as Fyfe has elsewhere described him – would never be entirely at ease with the establishments and managements he needed to serve.

Samuel Barber was treated with marginally more respect, though his reasons for choosing Decca were the same as Gillis’s: its famous ffrr sound, the new long-playing record, and its access to top-flight session musicians. Culshaw oversaw Barber conducting one of his loveliest works, the Cello Concerto, with Zara Nelsova as soloist, as well as a complete version of his wartime Second Symphony, a work Barber later withdrew.

After the untimely death in 1951 of Harry Sarton, Decca’s much-loved head of A&R, Culshaw took on responsibility for Decca artists contracted to the UK office. These included his longstanding friend, the pianist Julius Katchen, heard here in slightly off-the-wall accounts of Mozart’s concertos K415 and K466 which Culshaw recorded after returning to Decca in the wake of his ill-fated decision to defect to Capitol Records in 1954-55.

After Sarton’s death, Culshaw also found himself looking after places that held no interest for his own particular bête noire, Decca’s wheeler-dealing Swiss agent and effective head of A&R in Europe, Maurice Rosengarten. In 1952 Culshaw was in Copenhagen working with Carl Nielsen protégé, the conductor Thomas Jensen, on a famous recording of Nielsen’s ‘playing with dynamite’ First Symphony. The next year, it was ‘period’ Haydn – his Maria Theresa and Trauer symphonies – directed by Danish master Mogens Wöldike. Both discs were awarded rare two-star ratings by the collectors’ bible at the time, The Record Guide, and you can hear why.

It must have been the Nielsen connection, not to mention Culshaw’s obsession with new technologies, which led him to invite Nielsen’s former son-in-law, the old-school Hungarian violinist Emil Telmányi, to record Bach’s six Solo Sonatas and Partitas using a recently invented ‘period’ bow designed to obviate the need to arpeggiate triple- and quadruple-stopped chords. It was a pyrrhic victory. Beautiful as it all sounds, the device subverts Bach’s rhythms and anaesthetises his music.

The place Culshaw liked least was Paris. The staff were unreliable and French orchestras were a nightmare. How amusing, then, to hear Richard Blareau – composer, vaudeville artist and eponymous conductor of ‘Richard Blareau et son orchestre’ – persuading the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra to play Khachaturian’s Masquerade Suite with the joyous abandon of schoolboys who’ve discovered that their usual teachers have gone missing.

Paris was mainly where companies went to find French singers. One such was Mado Robin, the sadly short-lived French coloratura, famous for recording some of the highest notes ever committed to disc. The month before she starred in Decca’s famous 1952 recording of Delibes’s Lakmé, Culshaw recorded her in mad scenes from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor and Thomas’s Hamlet. (‘Mado Goes Mad’ was the American billing.) If you’ve never heard a coloratura deliver a dead-centre B flat three octaves above middle C, go to disc 7 track 5.

Perhaps the greatest fascination of the set lies in what it tells us about where Culshaw was heading. One road led towards Benjamin Britten, whose works Culshaw would chronicle in what is perhaps the greatest composer-producer relationship in the history of the gramophone. Included here are some historically important recordings of Britten’s music by the Boyd Neel Orchestra, and an unexpected delight: the opening concert of the coronation year Aldeburgh Festival. After you’ve enjoyed putting in order of merit the composers chosen by Britten (including himself) to contribute six short variations on ‘Sellinger’s Round’ from the first Elizabethan age, you can enjoy Alfred Deller, Peter Pears and others in a matchless account of Purcell’s anthem O Lord, grant the Queen [King] a long life. (Which, happily, He did.)

The other road most travelled was operatic, culminating in the thing for which Culshaw is perhaps most widely remembered, the Decca Ring. Live opera recording was a medium he instinctively disliked. Not even the legendary 1951 Bayreuth Parsifal which he produced (handsomely represented here) convinced him otherwise. As to the bizarre events surrounding Decca’s recording of the 1953 Bayreuth Lohengrin, they’re well documented here, along with a handful of extracts salvaged from the wreck. With Decca’s engineers already experimenting with stereophonic sound, it can’t have been long before Culshaw was dreaming up his ‘Sonicstage’ vision: elaborately staged studio opera recordings delivered directly to the collector’s listening room.

Which brings us to George Solti, with whom Culshaw developed a long, close and in some ways improbable working relationship. I say improbable, because there were aspects of Solti’s music-making that must have been anathema to Culshaw. In particular, there’s Culshaw’s publicly stated dislike of the ‘climax every second bar’ school of conducting. And there’s a second thing, mentioned in a memorable 1980 BBC Radio 3 talk on Wagner’s Götterdämmerung (the new set’s concluding item) in which Culshaw cites Wagner’s frustration with the otherwise reliable Hans Richter over his inability, should he find the right tempo, to sustain it, let alone effectively return to it. (A more common failing among conductors than many might imagine.) Culshaw names no names, though I remember him writing elsewhere of Britten’s rare ability to do just that.

Solti helped save Culshaw’s bacon during his time at Capitol by agreeing to record Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem with his Frankfurt forces. Released now for the first time in the UK, the 1954 recording has little to recommend it beyond striking contributions from the young Theo Adam. But it clearly deepened the bond between the two men in ways that would persist during the trials, tribulations and strangely haphazard progress towards the completion of the Decca Ring.

That final disc also includes the now notorious rehearsal sequence which Decca published alongside its ill-planned and ill-judged 1960 Vienna recording of Tristan und Isolde. It’s neither Solti’s nor Sonicstage’s finest half-hour, though it confirms my sense that, throughout their time together, it was Solti who was the apprentice, Culshaw – a born musician but so much more besides – ever the tolerant master.

Given that his years with Decca were among the most significant in the gramophone’s latter-day history, it’s wonderful to have these important yet often long-forgotten early recordings so expertly chronicled and restored.

This feature originally appeared in the July 2024 issue of Gramophone. Never miss an issue of the world's leading classical music magazine – subscribe to Gramophone today