Page 451 - Liverpool Philharmonic 22-23 Season Coverage Book

The New booklet has a radically compressed overview of the life and times
and this runs to only two pages. The author is Stephen Johnson who wrote it
in 1993. It’s in English, German and French. There’s a one-page synopsis of
the Boult rehearsal of Pilgrim’s Progress. Next comes an Index of Works so
you can identify the CD on which a particular work can be found. That’s a
useful new facility.

You no longer have to endure the ‘plain Jane’ flimsy white envelopes used in
the 2008 set. The New hard-card pockets identify the number of the disc
front and back and list each work and track. At the end of the New 16-page
booklet Warner have listed the titles and painters for the different paintings
that grace each of the thirty discs. The prominent names amongst the
painters are Philip W Steer (one of Holbrooke’s numerous artist friends), and
J E Millais. No doubt there were other, perhaps commercial, reasons but all
credit to Warner’s design contractor for seeking out paintings by the lesser
names such as Conder, Leader, Strang and Fanner among many others.
Warner adopted a similar approach for the label’s Complete Debussy box (33
CDs).

As to recordings featured you should look at the linked review for the 2008
set. However, given that in the first review, I skimmed my way through the
packed-full content let me try to pick up some things that I glossed over
some 14 years ago.

Dives and Lazarus Variants is indeed a noble and very beautiful work. It was
deployed for the 1939 World Fair in New York alongside Bax’s Seventh and
Bliss’s torridly romantic Piano Concerto. On the string orchestra disc
the Concerto Grosso is a beefy, emotional and kinetic score. I would never
have guessed that it was written for massed amateur forces, but you can tell
as much on a two-LP set proudly produced for the London schools in 1972
(centenary year). As for Vernon Handley whose choice for the nine
symphonies might seem “left field”, he - as a Boult protégé - always held a
torch for RVW: witness a mid-1960s 45 rpm of A Vision of Aeroplanes. There
he conducted the Guildford Proteus Singers years before he recorded Moeran
and Finzi with them for Revolution Records. Handley was an enterprising
choice even then. The symphonies, on CFP etc, lay in the future. While
EMI/Warner have opted for Handley’s mid-1990s RLPO symphony cycle they
tracked back to Boult for his Job rather than Handley’s. There’s plenty of
other Boult as well and not just in the choral-orchestral works.

The three-movement Violin Sonata with the violin of Hugh Bean (then part of
the Music Group of London) is well worth your attentive listening time. The
Sonata is underestimated and of considerable substance. Here it is flooded
with a passion that belies the fact that the composer had only another four
years to live when the Sonata was completed. There’s nothing here of the
feebleness of a venerable old age. Ideas burst forth and beauty positively
effervesces. Bean and pianist David Parkhouse press plenty of drama and
emotion into their reading and the recording is good for 1974. The music is
nicely nuanced, not least in the long finale’s Tema con variazioni. Bean’s Lark