Barshai recorded the Concerto for double string orchestra once before, over 20 years ago, with combined forces from Bath and Moscow. It is still available, as part of a two-LP 'tribute' to Tippett (HMV EX290228-3, 12/84), and it remains one of the very best accounts of the work to be had: full of vital, springing energy, and with the players showing a real delight in surmounting the athletic demands of the music. The new performance adds weight to the sinew of the older one, and a greater density of string tone, and awareness of the bow forcing down as well as bouncing up. Perhaps because of this the speeds are generally slower, in the first movement especially, and there is a less alert responsiveness to dynamic gradations, splendidly though the digital recording of the newcomer clarifies the spacing of the two orchestras and enables the ear to sort out the inner parts (not that the earlier version wasn't pretty good in both those respects). I prefer the 1963 performance on virtually every count, I'm sorry to say: turning back to it from the new version is simply to experience the music waking up.
The Ritual Dances are a bit slow and overweight, too, I fear: the alert, 'coursing' quality of the first dance is not quite caught, nor is the swooping of the hawk in the third. Dynamic contrasts, small-scale ones in particular, are under-inflected, and there is a general tendency to let the brass dominate the climaxes at the expense of the highly important things going on elsewhere in the orchestra. The recording is very natural, and there is a great deal of fine solo playing to be heard, but the outlines of this marvellous score have been thickened. After Barshai's splendid first account of the Concerto, and knowing how responsive the excellent Bournemouth orchestra are to him, I was expecting the exceptional and was disappointed.'