Allanfearn's channel

The 267 of us who have listened to this video and its first movement are very lucky. I still think Serkin's Royal Festival Hall performance of the mid fifties (in which he broke a string, but it didn't matter) is the most revelatory I ever heard, but this is in the same class. Everything that...

I think this was actually a public performance. A very special one. This shows Boult, every bit as good an accompanist as Barbirolli, and Hess herself, thinking as one. And even the BBC Orchestra, not often on its prewar form in the 1950s, playing as well as ever it did.

Bit of a shock for those of us who only heard her broadcasts in her old age to find that this wartime plum label HMV recording was actually made in her prime, when she was just over 50. I remember listening to an Eileen Joyce recording of this at school in the early fifties. The teacher in cha...

Listening to this is all about exquisite detail. There are details in Strauss scores, particularly in Don Juan, which only he takes the trouble to get right. The sound here is, for 1944, if that's when the footage was made, extraordinarily good. Pity about the TV director's lack of interest ...

Thank you for the programme notes. Which band is Harnoncourt conducting?

Fascinating - 66 comments. Not one notices Furtwangler's conducting. Not even in the recitative. That's a sign of greatness in this music, surely.

The CD cover shown doesn't list this piece - but is this in fact the string quartet named after Smetana led by Jiri Kohout? Yu Tube listing falls down with the distinction between composer and artist with groups named after composers. It sounds as though it is, in fact, the Smetana Quartet pla...

Sorry - I've just seen another posting on this page. The first violin IS Hauser, and Roisman isn't even present. For 1926, it's an excellent recording. The only Budapest recording of that era I know is the Beethoven first Razumovsky, and I haven't heard that for years. This shows how ...

For zugzwang - Guilty as charged. I'm sure the RLPO archivist will confirm it. Si non e vero......... Allanfearn

With all due respect, why "post-war"? (Not to mention which war?) She made her debut in 1907 and was still singing with power, purity and insight in 1950. And she was a motor-mechanic between times in World War II. Listening to this and "L' Absence" is heart-rending. "Greatest" on its own w...

Sorry to come back- the guy with the big violin wasn't a provincial musician called Elgar, but the guy in the tryptich you get when you come to the comments page is. If you want to know how good Casals was, there is an honest but very compromised transfer of the acetates of a pre-World War II p...

Adele Fachiri was Joachim's niece, and Jelly D'Aranyi's sister. Tovey knew Joachim

This is certainly rare music making.

Not such a good idea to include the score when the conductor ignores the fortes and pianos. It does matter in this music. I'm not so worried about the tempo, though it sounds indecisive. But the accents are far too heavy.

Curious to reflect they were almost exact contemporaries - Toscanini about two years the younger.

Toscanini made two commercial recordings of this overture. Is this the later of the two? The more you hear it the freeer it sounds, so I think it might be. But the earlier one is a magnificent study in concentration - every tempo is integrated perfectly.

From all the stereotyping in these comments, you wouldn't guess, would you that one of the composers Wagner admired above all was Bellini, and that his ideal of endless melody was Italian-inspired, that the instruments he knew in his youth didn't sustain anything like as well as those of Toscanin...

I don't want to be critical. But the world from which this music comes is simply not in this performance - and it should be. Part of the problem is the discipline - the band is together and and vigorous. But there is very little meaningful dynamic contrast and no sense of comfort with the s...

Somebody once said tempo was an illusion. Brahms is known (admittedly beacuse Weingartner says so) to have complimented the young Wagnerian Weingartner on his conducting of this symphony. But one of Weingartner's skills was to suggest a faster tempo by meticulous attention to detail, while rem...

I am a little puzzled by the claim that it was Joachim who suppressed the concerto. The English edition of his letters, published before the first world war, has more than one written to Schumann, indicating that a) he had played the work more than once (presumably run-throughs), and had decide...

Oh dear. I heard her when she was nearly 62, in Elgar's "The Kingdom". It wasn't what I would have called a "small voice". She sang for Toscanini, for heaven's sake, in the Beethoven Ninth in the London Queen's Hall. And you didn't make your name in North Country oratorio in the 1920s with...

The National Gallery sequence is by far the longest in the film and really quite subtle. They went to a lot of trouble with the Queen, if she wasn't actually there - bringing in Kenneth Clarke, who as Director of the Gallery would have been duty bound to be there on her left, and presumably the ...

Oh dear - not just for the news, but because "Safari can't find the server"! strange world we live in.

This recording of K 499 is as near perfection as the Budapest Quartet ever got. Posting it was a genuine public service. I can't believe only 229 folk have bothered to listen to this movement. Lets hope it's because everybody else knows these discs by heart.

The edition she uses sounds suspiciously like Bulow's.

Why the discrimination against the bassoons - they were actually audible in the fanfare!

I'm afraid the May gardens are still better than the Balliol buildings, unless you like the asymmetrical Waterhouse front and the Butterfield Chapel (though the Hall is better Waterhouse) - and some of this is a tour of the other colleges starting at Exeter, I think. But Oxford can be a cold pla...

I think this is a live broadcast with the Concertgebouw. If so the conductor will be Mengelberg, who accompanies with perfect sympathy - not easy. The Sauer of the 1890s saw himself as a pupil of Nicolas Rubinstein, not Liszt, with whom he had studied for two years. He seems to have changed hi...

He doesn't get a look in here, (Telramund never does - no wner he hates so hard) but Leif Roar was a considerable artist. What has happened to the videao recording of the marvellous Swedish production of Die Meistersinger in which he played Sachs? Goran Gentele, I think, was the producer. It ...