We owe a huge debt of gratitude to Lionel Hill (from whose private collection the present triptych was quarried) that he managed to persuade his father-in-law, the great Albert Sammons, to take up a work he was surely born to play. For those who love Moeran’s Violin Concerto as much as I do, hearing this glorious broadcast performance with Sir Adrian Boult and the BBC SO from April 1946 will be an intensely moving experience. Sammons plays with great poetry and sweetness of tone, while Boult’s masterful accompaniment is a model of enviable cogency and scrupulous sensitivity. In his booklet-essay, Hill (whose close friendship with Moeran is touchingly annotated in Lonely Waters; Thames: 1985) describes how ‘over the following months I moved Heaven and Earth to get HMV or Decca to record a performance with Sammons and Barbirolli – all to no avail.’ That same year, Sammons gave his last concert performance ever (of the Elgar) before he contracted the Parkinson’s disease that was to blight the remaining 11 years of his life.
The concerto is followed here by the first broadcast account of the 1946 Fantasy Quartet with dedicatee Leon Goossens and the Carter String Trio (who had given the premiere just a few days previously). Even more than Nicholas Daniel and the Vanbrugh Quartet, these artists reveal an improvisatory freedom and tangy earthiness in Moeran’s work – and listen to the relish with which they delineate those chugging ‘railway’ rhythms at 2'09'' and 9'38''. The inclusion of the original Third Programme announcements also lends an extra sense of occasion to the recording of Basil Cameron’s world premiere account of the Serenade in G (with the LSO). Like Vernon Handley in his admirable Ulster Orchestra account, Cameron invests this delightful score with a powerful symphonic logic and big-scale seriousness of intent (given here of course, in its original eight-movement guise, before Novello insisted that the composer cut the ‘Intermezzo’ and ‘Forlana’ prior to publication). Listen out in particular for some lovely string playing in the ‘Air’ (track 10).
Symposium’s no-frills Authentic Transfer Process makes no attempt to disguise the (at times disconcerting) roughness of the originals, but the sheer calibre of the music-making throughout easily triumphs over any such technical reservations and this is indeed a heartwarming release. Incidentally, on page 95 of his aforementioned book, Mr Hill refers to a private recording he had made of a February 1949 performance of the Symphony in G minor with Boult and the BBC SO: another Symposium candidate for CD resuscitation, I wonder?'