There is marvellous footage of Myra Hess playing Beethoven on Warner Vision's fascinating recent documentary The Art of Piano (see page 108). Her playing of the Appassionata Sonata is revealingly fiery, a useful antidote to what one might loosely dub the 'Jesu, joy' view of Dame Myra. Many collectors will also have her celebrated HMV recordings of Beethoven's Opp 109 and 110 Piano Sonatas (11/54 - nla) to which she makes passing reference in the archive interview with John Amis which rounds off the present CD.
Since Dame Myra mistrusted all recording, including recordings taken from live broadcasts, one wonders what she would make of the disc. She first appeared at the Proms in 1908 (Liszt's E flat Concerto with Henry Wood as conductor, fee three guineas) ; these performances, by contrast, come near the end of her career. They are not, in the very nature of things, inch-perfect (either the soloist's work or that of Sargent's BBC SO). There are certainly stretches, in the first movement of the 1960 Proms performance of the B flat Concerto, where loftiness, luminescence and vitality go hand in hand; and her 1957 reading of the E flat Concerto still has a significant power of command. That said, neither performance is representative of Hess at her best; nor could either be said to be of much use to the non-specialist collector. Curiously, the 1957 recording is the better of the two; superior to the 1960 recording in both presence and clarity.
The seven-minute interview, though, recorded in 1962, is a gem. This was a golden age of talk about music on the radio when, happily, the BBC also had the staff and resources to preserve a great deal on disc and tape. The vast library of Amis interviews (a reminder that informality and accessibility were not skills pioneered in the 1990s) is itself worth a king's ransom. I won't divulge the contents of the interview with Dame Myra. Suffice it to say, it is both illuminating and entertaining. Beecham's admirers (and detractors) may find it particularly so.'