I’m still not managing to post here as often as I would have liked. I probably never will.

Among CDs I’ve listened to recently, I finally got round to Mark Elder’s recording of Gerontius, which was highly enjoyable, though I’ll still go back to Sargent with Heddle Nash! Somm’s reissue of Boult conducting Walton’s First Symphony and Belshazzar’s Feast was a fantastic listen – I’d forgotten quite how quickly Boult takes some parts of the great choral work. Also on British vocal music, Divine Art’s reissue of 2CDs worth of 78s of works by Peter Warlock was enthralling, with Peter Dawson, Roy Henderson and Dennis Noble particularly involving.

In the LP and 78 area, my collection of recordings by Franz André continues to grow, and more of these will reach my website in the coming months. These include his recordings of works by Coates, Elgar and Gershwin, and his 1812 overture. I also got hold of a French LP of Mozart recordings on “disques vogues”. It contains Jean Witold conducting Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, Pauline Aubert playing the Rondo alla Turca on harpsichord, and two of the K107 Piano concertos (arrangements of JC Bach sonatas) played by Robert Veyron-Lacroix and the Collegium Musicum de Paris under Roland Douatte. The sound balance in the concerti may need some work, but the recordings are all quite interesting. The sleeve notes include an excitingly multi-coloured spectrum illustrating the full range of human hearing, as reproduced on the record, and the brief descriptions of the recordings are translated from French to rather bad English. Eine Kleine Nachtmusik contrives on sleeve and label to have its second movement split in two as “Romance” and “Andante”.

The latest update to my website will be live in the next couple of hours, and contains the following:
Fabien Sevitzky conducts the Philadelphia Chamber String Sinfonietta in Arensky’s Variations on a Theme of Tchaikovsky (1942)
Marie Novello plays Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No.2 (abridged, 1921)
Thorpe Bates sings the Captain’s Song from HMS Pinafore, with chorus of Ernest Pike, Stanley Kirkby, Peter Dawson (1906)
Joseph Batten conducts “March of Victory” for the National Savings Movement, with baritones Thorpe Bates and Walter Saull (1945)
Henry Wood conducts Vaughan Williams’s Serenade to Music (improved transfer 1938)
Michael Zacharewitsch plays violin solos (c1920)

The first is an unusual recording by the wonderful British baritone Dennis Noble, and is not listed in the discography of Noble which appeared in The Record Collector in 2004. The record label is a private EMI pressing made to promote the National Savings scheme. The songs on one side are a “Silver Lining Medley”, and on the other “Look for the Silver Lining.” These were presumably chosen to tie in with the film “Look for the Silver Lining”, a 1949 biopic of Marilyn Miller. In the medley, Noble sings two songs, and C Wright (a very English tenor crooner) sings another. A fourth is assigned to the chorus. The second side has Noble singing with the chorus. Both sides are introduced by actor Norman Shelley (“Hello everyone! Are you a national saver?”).

Around the same time, Eugene Goossens was conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, and can be heard in Delius’s The Walk to the Paradise Garden.

Some decades before, a Russian conductor made recordings in the US – Vassily Andreyev took his Balalaika Orchestra on tour there in 1911. One of the sides he made cropped up as a filler side for Landon Ronald’s abridged recording of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. The recordings this time are from a Victrola 78.

An altogether different sound comes from an early single-side Zonophone of Fucik’s “Entry of the Gladiators”, recorded a little before it acquired its circus connotations. The “Zonophone Military Band” credited on the label is actually the Band of H.M. Colstream Guards, conducted by John Mackenzie-Rogan.

Maintaining the Czech theme, Dvorak’s New World Symphony receives a compelling performance from Jascha Horenstein on a Vox LP. The tempi are occasionally slower than one might expect, but the conductor’s attention to detail makes for a highly satisfying account.

And finally, Dean Dixon makes a long overdue appearance on my site. He claimed he could divide his career into three phases, where he was respectively “the black conductor Dean Dixon”, “the American conductor Dean Dixon”, and then after success in Europe, simply “the conductor Dean Dixon.” He recorded extensively in Europe, through to the 1970s, and indeed I have more recordings by him than can appear on my site, as many are still in copyright. The three LPs I’ve uploaded this time include Schumann’s 3rd and 4th Symphonies, Schubert’s 4th and 5th Symphonies, and Schubert’s Rosamunde music. All were recorded in the 1950s.

I listened to yesterday to the new Naxos Historical issue of Bartok’s American recordings – highly enjoyable, and in excellent sound. The excerpts from Mikrokosmos were a particular delight. Last weekend I finally found time to listen to the Gobbi/Christoff/de los Angeles recording of Simon Boccanegra, also reissued on Naxos Historical, with the vocal score to hand. It’s a fascinating work, and hearing Gobbi heading the cast makes me curious to hear quite what Placido Domingo does with the title role – I understand there will be a live BBC relay of one of his Covent Garden performances later this year.

On the website side of things, there are several new items, which will be appearing within the next few days, including symphonies conducted by Dean Dixon and Jascha Horenstein, an early “Entry of the Gladiators” nominally by the “Zonophone Military Band”, but actually John Mackenzie-Rogan and the Coldstream Guards Band. There will also be a balalaika orchestra, and one of Eugene Goossens recordings for Victor.

There will be also be a late 1940s 78 featuring Dennis Noble, but one which the baritone’s discography in The Record Collector doesn’t include. It was a private issue by EMI promoting the National Savings scheme. Noble gets a few brief solos, as does a C Wright, presumably a singer of lighter fare, whose first name I have been unable to track down.