Here's an unfashionable record in this age of authenticity and back-to-the-original. Full-blown orchestral arrangements of Handel are hardly the thing, and I admire the way Richard Morrison has tiptoed cautiously between outright condemnation and grudging admiration in his sleeve-note: I gather it's hardly done in decent dinner-party circles these days to admit that one actually prefers Beethoven as played by the Berlin Philharmonic to Beethoven as played by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment or whatever. Yet it's difficult not to be insidiously influenced by these purist passions, and I admit that after 63 minutes of the music on this disc, I did sigh for a few cleansing bars from John Eliot Gardiner.
Elgar's transcription of the Overture in D minor has a certain nobility and integrity of its own, one great composer commenting on another, as with Schoenberg and Webern on Bach and Tippett on Corelli but Beecham was not a great composer, merely a clever arranger (did he do it himself, I wonder?) and the anachronisms prove rather wearing after a while, particularly the ridiculous Dramatico in The Gods Go a'Begging where the brass and strings evoke Wagner's gods not Handelian classical deities. His Faithful Shepherd suite has some felicitous detail, but perhaps it needs Sir Thomas's own sparkle to keep it from soon outstaying its welcome. And I must say I found Allan Bennett's Handel at Bath a turgid bore, it was a relief to discover that only three movements are recorded although the note refers to four.
The recording, made in a Morden church, is not over-resonant and balance is generally good. Menuhin obtains respectable playing, though only in the Arrival of the Queen of Sheba do the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra sound as if the ghost of its founder was urging them on. A reviewer, of course, is bound to play the disc right through at a sitting. No one in their senses should emulate him. It is best taken in small doses, when it is less likely to pall as quickly as it did for me.'