In a word: uncompetitive. Nothing but the best will do for VW’s visionary masterpiece, but Douglas Bostock’s new account falls short in so many key areas. For a start, his hard-working Munich orchestra is neither the most tonally alluring nor flexible of instruments (and there are a couple of misplaced cymbal clashes in scenes 2 and 4 which prove irksome on repeated hearings) and he seems unable to draw playing of the necessary malignant pungency in, say, ‘Satan’s Dance of Triumph’, scene 4’s ‘Dance of Plague, Pestilence, Famine and Battle’ or that shattering vision of Satan sitting on God’s throne in scene 6 (very underwhelming when given without organ, as here). More worryingly, Bostock (a pupil of Boult, to whom VW’s great score bears a dedication) directs in rather too literal a fashion throughout, and his efficient conception barely hints at the sheer temperament and authoritative stature displayed by his mentor in a legendary 1946 recording with the BBC SO (still the interpretative touchstone, in my view). Nor does Bostock distil much sense of the ‘spirit of the dance’ that gives Lloyd-Jones’s Naxos version its own distinctive appeal. The sound isn’t special, either, being slightly constricted and two-dimensional in effect. No challenge, then, to Handley’s compelling 1983 account (one of the supreme VW bargains in the current catalogue).
Die-hards may wish to investigate Bostock’s satisfyingly sturdy premiere recording of the Prelude on an Old Carol Tune (a charming six-minute essay, drawn from VW’s incidental music for a highly-acclaimed 1951 BBC radio production of Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge), but the Variations for Brass Band (in Gordon Jacob’s engaging and expert orchestral guise – the original was a test piece at the 1957 National Brass Band Championship of Great Britain) emerges a little bluffly by the side of Hickox’s splendid Bournemouth SO version on EMI where the coupling is a memorably characterful and illuminating Job that easily outclasses the present offering (7/92, sadly unavailable at present).'