This latest batch of Beecham reissues contains a number of collectors’ items alongside some less pleasing reminders of the fact that when the Beecham magic was switched off the music-making could be downright coarse. The digital remastering also brings mixed insights. Several recordings which sounded perfectly well on LP are now revealed to be blowzy and hard-edged; others which didn’t sound well on 78 and LP turn out to be rather fine.

Since the principal villain of the piece is Walthamstow Town Hall, the venue for Beecham’s CBS/Philips recordings, it is a relief to discover that his celebrated 1952 account of Goldmark’s five-movement symphonic poem Rustic Wedding was recorded by EMI in Abbey Road. Hans Richter had conducted the work’s première in Vienna in 1876 but it was Beecham who more or less single-handedly rescued it from obscurity, turning it into a piece Dvorák himself might have been proud to own. Alas, as Alan Jefferson has remarked, though sounding amazingly fresh and beautiful under Beecham’s hand, Rustic Wedding tends to sound pretty hopeless when anyone else conducts it. (Just about the only plausible post-Beecham version is Yondani Butt’s RPO recording on ASV, 5/92.) If you don’t have the work on record, the Beecham is required listening. His Handel-derived concert suite The Faithful Shepherd makes a splendid coupling, by turns succulent and rousing.

The Tchaikovsky disc is less desirable. In the early 1950s the Little Russian Symphony was almost as much a rarity on record as Rustic Wedding, which partly explains why this 1953 Beecham recording held court for so long. He is somewhere near his best in the first movement, and in the finale, where the style and panache of the playing more than compensate for the cuts. The performance is marred, however, by a controversially slow Andantino marziale. It is the work’s weakest movement and Beecham’s portentous conducting merely draws attention to the fact. His account of the Scherzo is also strangely lethargic. The Nutcracker music comes up new-minted – a brutally rushed ‘Danse russe’ and an unpleasing end to the ‘Waltz of the Flowers’ notwithstanding – but the Walthamstow recording, though exceptionally clear, is horribly metallic.

There is also a less than happy situation where the Walthamstow recording of the two early Schubert symphonies is concerned. What appeared on LP to be a plausibly intimate ensemble turns out to have been a veritable army of musicians camped out in general view of the microphones. As to the performances, the Beecham ‘recipe’ is a familiar one: a general agreement as to playing style, exquisitely tapered phrasing in slow movements and a certain buccaneering spirit in the quicker ones. The Second Symphony comes off pretty well but the First is neither as tidily played, nor as tidily edited, as one might hope.

The Unfinished, by contrast, is a classic account which still sounds well, despite at least one all-too-audible tape edit. A tale of two movements and two venues, Kingsway Hall and Abbey Road, this was a much collected version in the early years of LP. In what is a relatively swift-moving account of the first movement, the dramatic and reflective elements are cleverly held within a single frame of reference; after which the slow movement gently broods and sings.

Never a man to pass up the chance of phrasing a great melody as beautifully as he knows how, Beecham proves to be an ideal accompanist for the 31-year-old Isaac Stern in the Brahms Violin Concerto. It might be objected that Stern’s way with the first movement is too personal, too expansive, but this is to miss the strength and shapeliness of the performance as a whole, ripe but never cloying. The 1951 EMI recording catches the sumptuously beautiful fiddle sound extremely well. In the Sibelius Concerto, Stern’s involvement is palpable in every phrase. (He had recently met the composer while appearing in Helsinki’s inaugural Sibelius Week.) Others may vie with him technically (there are lapses of intonation at the end of the first movement and in the finale) but Beecham’s conducting, as electrifying as it is truthful, gives the recording its particular authority.

The BBC Legends anthology, based on items Beecham recorded for the 100th edition of the BBC’s Music to Remember in October 1956, is a bitter disappointment. Practically everything in the collection has the air of being played in a brash, no-nonsense way with few of the refinements we normally look for from Beecham in this repertory. The somewhat cavernous Maida Vale acoustic does not help nor, possibly, did the context: musical bonbons recorded ‘cold’ before a studio audience. One has only to compare this workmanlike Maida Vale account of Massenet’s ‘The Last Sleep of the Virgin’ with Beecham’s hypnotic 1954 Proms performance (BBC Legends, 10/01) to hear the difference. A coarse and ill-balanced España and a plodding, disjunct Rouet d’Omphale are particular disappointments. The transfers are workmanlike but there is some residual tape hiss and an obvious problem with the tape itself at 3'24" in the first movement of the Mozart.