It is good to have such vintage Beecham performances on a super-bargain disc in Naxos’s Historical series. Even without the help of evocative, atmospheric recorded sound, the total persuasiveness of Beecham in Delius comes over irresistibly in these performances. There was little danger, particularly in such pre-war recordings, of Beecham merely languishing in Delius. That was equally so both in the 1920s recordings of the First Cuckoo and Summer Night on the River, and in the other items, recorded in 1934 for the first volume of the Columbia Delius Society. It is striking what power and vigour Beecham finds in the climaxes of the longer pieces, Eventyr and Paris; and the closing scene of Koanga, with the women’s chorus provided by the London Select Choir, has a surging warmth that leaves one wanting to hear the complete opera.
The Koanga item fares rather better than the rest for recording quality: there is at least a hint of space around the sound, even though the acoustic is still very dry and the women’s chorus has a one-dimensional quality. In the rest, I fear, the sound in these Naxos transfers is drier still, boxy and severely damped down. That is not what I remember of the original 78s, which, like most Beecham/LPO discs of the pre-war period, had a fair bloom. I suspect that the Cedar digital noise-reduction system has been applied a little too enthusiastically here, for, among other labels, Dutton Laboratories has shown in its Beecham issues that a sense of presence and atmosphere can be achieved while giving a faithful impression of the original recording. Here, for example, the percussion passages in Paris are curiously ill-focused, when even on 78s percussion regularly came over well.'