These are good performances, as you would expect, and they gain added interest from the fact that they represent, in a sense, Boult's 'first thoughts' about two works with which he was especially closely associated and which he was later to record repeatedly. In a word, they are a touch stiffer, a touch more sober than his more familiar accounts on LP: the string solos in the Fantasia are precisely turned rather than presented with rhapsodic rubato; Elihu in Job dances with a slightly reserved tenderness. But from time to time there is also a sense, in Job rather than the Fantasia (a work that was already a generation old when this recording was made), of sounds being crafted that are not only beautiful but new: the simple yet wonderfully fresh high woodwind octaves in the archaic second melody of the ''Munuet of the Sons of Job and their Wives'', for example.
The playing is good, too, the characterful woodwind and powerful but never coarse brass giving muscle as well as elegiac beauty to this music (though in ''Job's Dream'' there is a strong indication that viola playing, at least, has improved quite a bit in 40 years). That having been said, I cannot think of any respect in which these performances are actually preferable to Sir Adrian's later readings, and the recordings, carefully though they have been transferred, are greyish and at times congested, with touches of distortion here and there (quite a nasty one at cue C in the Fantasia). Primarily for specialists in orchestral history or collectors of creator's recordings, I suspect.
The Fantasia, by the way, has been issued on LP before, in the BBC Artium mono boxed set published to commemorate the BBC Symphony Orchestra's 50th anniversary in 1980 (BBC4001, 8/80). '