This may seem a strange mixture, but Britten as conductor brings to each item a striking freshness. How unusual it is these days to have a performance of Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture – the item which opens the sequence – lasting less than ten minutes, something which we regularly had in the days of short-playing 78s. This is a performance, recorded at The Maltings in June 1971, which, urgent and vigorous, gives a storm-tossed view of the Hebrides, while bringing out the strength of the musical structure. Britten gives warmth to the phrasing without unduly pulling the tempo about.
That and the Beethoven overture, given a similarly alert and dramatic reading in a 1966 performance at Blythburgh Church, are specially valuable since Britten otherwise made no commercial recordings of either composer’s music. The Debussy too is wonderfully fresh, starting with Richard Adeney’s mistily cool flute solo and presenting the whole score with a rare transparency, so that every strand is audible, and the climax in the middle is strong and passionate – a remarkable reading.
The recording, also made at Blythburgh, is a degree more immediate, less atmospheric than those from The Maltings, but the extra impact is an advantage, as it is in Britten’s account of the Haydn symphony, which in its C minor angularity at the start has the biting toughness of Sturm und Drang. The slow movement – marred by a bronchial woman in the audience – is flowing and well moulded in the manner that Britten preferred in eighteenth-century symphonies, but the Minuet is brisk and swaggering, slowing for the Trio with its big cello solo, before the finale returns to Sturm und Drang in headlong contrapuntal writing.
Mozart’s Haffner Symphony, recorded in The Maltings in 1972, brings sound rather less focused than on the rest of the disc, with the timpani in the finale very boomy. But it is an amiable performance, energetic in the outer movements, warmly affectionate in the slow movement, in which Britten repeats the first section. An odd grouping of works, but one which vividly recaptures the electricity that Britten created in his Aldeburgh Festival performances.'