I remember the original Pye/Nixa mono LP (1/60) very well; I can still see the crude cinemascopic sleeve design, and I've never forgotten those first sounds: the primitive drone of two tenor tubas, brazen trumpets against hacking trombones and timpani—the opening bars of Janacek's Sinfonietta as naked as nature intended them. Here once again, then, is the first-flush of Mackerras's Janacek, red in tooth and claw, uninhibited, impassioned, urgently communicative; Janacek with all the nerve endings exposed and tingling. The rest, of course, is history. Rehearing this now, I wonder if Mackerras himself is thinking as I am—that his laudable Vienna Philharmonic Decca recording of the Sinfonietta sounds, by comparison, almost Straussian, a shade too plush for comfort. Notwithstanding the fierce, strident cast of these weathered recordings—a quality inevitably exacerbated on CD (is there no gentler way of easing us into the noisy tape and studio atmosphere of these older remasterings?)—the colours are in every way the more Janacekian: the coarse-grained rusticity of the brass and woodwinds, strings with a capacity for amplitude without the surface sheen.
Mackerras sets a bristling pace, Janacek's plangent military fanfares going off with a tremendous swing. On then to put the Moravian folk-dancing back into Janacek's second movement, replete with wild gipsy-violins high in the ledger-lines and muted trombones rudely marking time. Everywhere character, colour and cast, the risky extremes of tempo, rhythm, accenting and dynamics which go to make up the Janacek sound—all are instinctively right. Mackerras has always achieved a magnificent effect with the finale, working up an irresistible head of steam as all 12 trumpets prepare the way for that grandest of reprises. In the closing bars he makes no concessions to the strings and woodwinds whose tumultuous trills almost succumb to the welter of brass sound. But better this sense of strings and woodwind overreached than the somewhat literal view of Janacek's dynamics favoured by some conductors (Rattle for EMI and the new Belohlavek on Chandos—see below—among them).
In the opera preludes, the wonder is that any British orchestra of the day could have hurled themselves with such devil-may-care abandon into these treacherous and largely uncharted waters. The sheer physical and emotional heat of the playing is quite extraordinary. Andrew Porter, when reviewing the original mono release in 1960, spoke of ''burning belief'' and ''the strangeness and beauty of the music... being revealed for the first time''. He was right in more ways than one.
The two non-Janacek fillers date from the same sessions in 1959. The Polka and Fugue from Schwanda the Bagpiper is full of rowdy good humour with rattling good trumpets and grand organ much in evidence, while The bartered bride Overture goes at an unnerving pace (intrepid woodwinds tonguing away for dear life), Mackerras phrasal instincts and keen ear for accent invigorating. Required listening, then, and you can be green into the bargain—each sale makes a donation to the ''Music for the World'' charity.'