Search - Mousorgsky, Dvorak, Balakirev :: Sir Hamilton Harty Conducts Music by Mousorgsky, Balakirev, Dvorak, Bax, Elgar, Berlioz

Verve, dash, and the ambience of the concert hall.

John Austin | Kangaroo Ground, Australia | 02/13/2001

(5 out of 5 stars)

"As a composer, Sir Hamilton Harty is well represented in the CD catalogues these days. His arrangements of suites from Handel's "Water Music" and "Royal Fireworks Music" are also once again in vogue. No one browsing this web site is likely to have heard him as a conductor, certainly not in the original Free Trade Hall, Manchester, England, where several of these recordings were made. In the early days of electrical recording, his performances with the Halle Orchestra were mainstays of the English Columbia catalogue, noted for their verve and dash and for the well-caught ambience of the concert hall.Symposium offer a splendid CD allowing some of these long-unavailable recordings to be heard again, free of speed and pitch variation problems. A snappy performance of Dvorak's "New World" Symphony is the main item, recorded at one session in 1927. Sophisticated restoration processes cannot rectify some of the erratic "knob-twiddling" for which the original engineers were responsible, nor can the weak and ill-defined bass be given a clearer image, but nevertheless the excitement comes through. The Australian baritone Harold Williams leads a quintet of singers in an excerpt which Harty conducts from Elgar's "The Apostle", the earliest and one of the clearest of all these recordings.At the same session as the Mussorgsky item was made, Harty and the Halle Orchestra recorded two choral items with the Manchester Children's Choir which were best sellers for many years, certainly in Australia, but which are hard to find on the CD market."