Some background information to begin with, I think. After a spell as Julius Harrison’s assistant at the Hastings Municipal Orchestra, George Weldon (1908-63) succeeded Leslie Heward as Musical Director of the City of Birmingham Orchestra in 1943, quickly becoming a firm favourite with audiences. He was soon spotted by Walter Legge at EMI and embarked on a recording career that was to last right up to his death. In 1951, Weldon was appointed Associate Conductor of the Halle at the behest of Sir John Barbirolli, who spoke of him in the warmest terms: “A really fine musician of very wide range and sympathies … as a colleague he was helpfulness and loyalty personified, the perfect associate, musically and personally.” Sadly, a combination of poor health and increasing disaffection checked the modest Weldon’s progress, and, tragically, he eventually took his own life whilst on a guest-conducting tour of South Africa.
The performances on this welcome Dutton retrospective are honest, sensitive and thoroughly professional (the orchestral playing is always first-rate), yet they lack, to my ears at any rate, that last ounce of temperament and characterful flair. Take the glorious central melody of The Wasps overture: Weldon shapes it with the necessary affection, and the LSO strings are with him all the way; yet turn to Boult’s roughly contemporaneous Decca account and VW’s sublime inspiration rapturously takes flight (and the LPO’s response brims with spontaneity). The comparison may be cruel, but it is instructive and proves fairly indicative of the whole.
The best items here are a stately, sonorous St Paul’s Suite (such sumptuous Philharmonia string-tone in the finale), the rumbustious Marching Song and a meticulous, if slightly under-energized Tintagel. Elsewhere, however, one can’t help but register a certain strait-laced efficiency about Weldon’s readings. Both the remainder of VW’s “Aristophanic Suite” and Holst’s ballet music from The Perfect Fool are wanting in mischievous sparkle and point; the latter’s A Somerset Rhapsody, too, is strangely unevocative and heavy-of-foot.
Needless to say, recordings of 1953-5 vintage have come up with irrepressible vividness. A release, I would suggest, primarily of interest to admirers and ‘completists’ only.'