Here is another very happy marriage resulting from EMI's Beecham collaboration with CBS. The Nutcracker Suite was recorded by Philips engineers for CBS in December 1953, and apparently became one of Beecham's favourite discs. The sound on the new issue is remarkably truthful for its date, and beautifully balanced, so much so that it prompts the question as to why some other Beecham/Philips recordings from this period were so much less impressive.
Beecham conducts the ballet suite with supreme elegance and in a wonderfully spirited, joyful fashion. How deliciously he points the ''Miniature Overture'' and the ''March'', and how dancers would have relished his infectious rhythms in these two numbers. The ''Russian Dance'' is taken at a pretty fast initial tempo, and then Beecham steps wickedly on the accelerator to produce a fast and furious ending, with the RPO coping magnificently. He finds an extraordinarily haunting beauty in the ''Arabian Dance'' and throughout the performance he brings, as he did so often, fresh insights and magic to a familiar score. What a pity then, that the sound at the end of the concluding ''Waltz of the Flowers'' is so abruptly cut off, to bring things down to earth with a bump. I do hope that this fault can be rectified at some point.
The Fourth Symphony was recorded towards the end of 1957, when the RPO was on a visit to Paris. At that time EMI's French colleagues had yet to acquire stereo facilities and so the recording is in mono only, though the sound is very good. Efforts to re-record the symphony in stereo were made in London the following April, but alas only part of the work was then taped. The performance is magnificent. In the first movement Beecham conducts with considerable energy and passion for a man approaching his eightieth year, but with superb clarity and balance, too, so that for once the movement's structure seems rock-like. The second movement is most eloquently played, and again one is aware of a beautifully balanced reading, richly expressive, but possessing aristocratic refinement. After a superbly paced third movement Beecham unleashes the finale with some force. But he is always in control, and the music is articulated clearly, even in its most exciting moments. There is no undue rhetoric or vulgar display, and emotions are never taken to excess.
Here is familiar repertoire, maybe, but Beecham's performances are revelatory.'