Name: The Formative Years - Pioneering Sound Recordings from the 1930s
Price: 7.15 USD
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Release Date: 28th Sep 2009
Catalogue No: LPO0040
Label: LPO

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Mozart: Symphony No. 39 in E flat major, K543 (excerpts)

Recorded live during a concert at BASF Feierabendhaus, Ludwigshafen, Germany, 19 November 1936
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Sir Thomas Beecham

Delius: On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring

Recorded live during a concert at BASF Feierabendhaus, Ludwigshafen, Germany, 19 November 1936
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Sir Thomas Beecham

Rimsky Korsakov: Le Coq d'Or

Recorded live during a concert at BASF Feierabendhaus, Ludwigshafen, Germany, 19 November 1936
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Sir Thomas Beecham

Mozart: Symphony No. 41 in C major, K551 'Jupiter'

Recorded at Abbey Road Studios London, 19 March 1934
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Sir Thomas Beecham

Mozart: Symphony No. 41 in C major, K551 'Jupiter' (excerpts)

Recorded at Abbey Road Studios London, 19 March 1934
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Sir Thomas Beecham

Binaural / Stereo test by Alan Blumlein ‘Walking, Talking’

Recorded 15 December 1933
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Sir Thomas Beecham

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‘You Londoners want to know what an orchestra ought to be like? Well, just listen to this.’ Ernest Newman, Sunday Times, October 1932

Two of the most significant pioneering experiments in sound recording, stereophonic sound and recording on tape, involved the London Philharmonic Orchestra and its founder Sir Thomas Beecham. At Beecham’s famous mono recording session of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony in 1934, engineers experimented simultaneously with stereo sound and during a tour of Germany in 1936 part of one of the Orchestra’s concerts was recorded using the revolutionary invention of tape. The results of these landmark moments in the Orchestra’s history are restored here for the first time in full. Astonishingly when Beecham started conducting in the early 1900s, Mozart’s music was hardly known in the UK. With the single-mindedness for which he was renowned, the conductor set out to change this perspective, giving performances that bore out his claim that the two virtues necessary for a successful presentation of the music were ‘the maximum of virility, coupled with the maximum of delicacy’. Nowhere did he combine these two elements more effectively than in his approach to Mozart’s symphonies, where his bold, masculine phrasing, sense of line and fastidious attention to detail virtually created a new style.

Beecham was a lifelong champion of the music of Mozart, and his recordings of nine of Mozart’s symphonies between 1934 and 1940 with the LPO are still regarded as benchmark recordings to this day.

This is the first time that the results of Alan Blumlein’s experiments with stereophonic sound and the Orchestra have been heard in full.

Momentous pioneering developments are documented here in full for the very first time.

An opportunity for collectors given the significance of this development in recording technology.

A great addition to the catalogue to sit alongside The Founding Years: Sir Thomas Beecham (LPO0006)

Special offer. The Formative Years - Pioneering Sound Recordings from the 1930s

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