In a celebrated LP rehearsal disc (nla), Beecham bemoaned to the percussionists in Symphony No. 100, his ''military gentlemen'', the lack of a side drum. ''How very remiss of Haydn, having taken the trouble to write a 'Military' symphony, to limit himself to three percussion instruments. Well, we must do something about this, I think.'' An idle threat here, as it turns out, though Beecham is certainly not averse to the odd retouching elsewhere. Then there's the question of the actual editions used: Beecham's contempt for musicology and musicologists (''people who can read music but can't hear it'') was legendary. In making these recordings he seems to have taken pleasure in working from the most corrupt nineteenth-century scores he could lay his hands on, which means, in addition to countless spurious phrasing and dynamic markings, you'll hear no clarinets in the Trio of No. 103 and no 'wrong harmony' joke in the Trio of The Clock—surely, right up Beecham's street, this. And with a cavalier attitude to editions goes a cavalier attitude to repeats, which are included or ignored at will in slow movements and in minuets, and invariably omitted in sonata allegros—almost a criminal offence today.
Purists and ascetics, then, will keep a safe distance from this set. But for those of more hedonistic outlook, these vintage recordings offer rich delight. Beecham's sympathy for Haydn was virtually unique among British musicians of his generation, rivalled only by that of Tovey. His own band, the superlative RPO (has any orchestra ever surpassed its regal woodwind section?), is, of course, larger than would be countenanced today in such music; tempos, especially in the minuets, tend to be ample and stately; and phrases are moulded, caressed, cajoled in a way that contradicts all our notions of authentic late-eighteenth-century style. But the performances have such self-assurance, such wit, style and panache, such rhythmic verve and subtlety, that criticism is all but silenced. It would take a strong man indeed to resist Beecham's jaunty elegance in the second subject of No. 99's opening movement (3'27'') or his relishing of the saucy badinage in the second theme of the finale (1'08''); or his deliciously sly pointing of the ticking rhythm in the Andante of No. 101; or, at the other end of the spectrum, the exquisite nostalgia he finds in the Trio in No. 104.
But Beecham's Haydn is far more than a series of incidental sensual pleasures. Like Sir Colin Davis in his magnificent set of the ''London'' Symphonies on Philips (7/92), Beecham has a shrewd command of long-term strategy, a profound grasp of the dynamic of Haydn's immensely sophisticated sonata structures. Climaxes are unerringly sensed and clinched—listen, for example, to the magnificent way he builds the tension in both the development and the coda of No. 99's great Adagio (and never mind the illicit addition of horns at 3'29'' in the development); or to the toughness and trenchancy of the first-movement development in No. 102, with its slashing offbeat accents—a far cry, this, from the waggish, urbane, cane-twirling Beecham of popular mythology. And then there's the sheer grandeur and lyrical intensity of No. 104, from its massive, monumental slow introduction to its incandescent peroration.
For all Beecham's rhythmic legerdemain, one or two movements may strike you as impossibly slow—the Minuet (marked Allegro) of No. 102, for instance, which comes dangerously close to grandiloquence. But elsewhere a tempo that initially takes you aback will be gloriously vindicated. The opening of the Andante piu tosto allegretto of No. 103 is conceived by Beecham as an Adagio funeral march (quaver=74); yet the performance (shorn of most repeats, be warned!) has such gravity, such inwardness, such hypnotic intensity of phrasing that many of the more authentically paced readings you hear today seem tripping and trivial by comparison.
You can't, of course, expect state-of-the-art sound from the 1958-9 recordings, made in Paris's Salle Wagram and EMI's London Abbey Road Studio No. 1. There's a variable amount of tape hiss; and the violins are slightly thin, the brass too recessed and the orchestra's lower reaches a touch murky, with muffled, even inaudible timpani—though both timpani and brass have rather more definition in No. 104 than elsewhere. Nor does the recording do justice to the excitingly wide dynamic range that, by all accounts, was a feature of Beecham's Haydn in concert. But the overall sound is pleasingly warm and atmospheric. And for all their idiosyncrasies and occasional perversities the performances themselves have a rare humanity, sensibility and depth of musical insight. They leave you in no doubt that here is a supremely great musician directing supremely great music.'