Those readers who saw Stokowski conduct will remember how he would mount the podium, acknowledge audience applause, and then turn round and start to conduct immediately. This practice occasionally caught players on the hop and also here the French radio announcer, whose embarrassed introduction peters out over the beginning of Ravel's Alborada. In this piece the recording starts at high volume, distorts at the first climax and then retreats to a more suitable level. Throughout all three FNRO items the sound is pretty close and cramped, and gives little pleasure. Stokowski recorded these works with the same orchestra for a Capitol LP (12/59—nla), and it seems extremely likely that the live performances were harnessed to the studio sessions.
Escales is given a neat, colourful and lively reading, with superb artistry from the solo oboe. (On the commercial LP he is named as Jules Goetghsluck, and is no doubt the same player who Beecham admired so much when he worked with the orchestra at this time.) The Alborada receives a vigorous, up-beat performance, but the first movement of ''Iberia'' is taken far too quickly, so that even the virtuoso FNRO can only gabble its way through. No lazy Spanish rhythms here. There is more atmosphere in the work's middle section (although Stokowski loses his way for a few bars), and the festive atmosphere of the last part emerges very faithfully.
L'apres-midi was a Stokowski favourite (he left five studio recordings of the work), and he persuades the Frankfurt orchestra to play in a lush, sensuous fashion. The recording here is more spacious than in the Paris items. Stokowski recorded no works by Milhaud commercially, and it is good to have his idiomatic account of the brief Percussion Concerto. The recording here is every efficient, and the German orchestra captures Milhaud's smart Gallic style with splendid panache. The soloist is not named.'