A very special forthcoming ICA Classics release devoted to live performances under Sir Adrian Boult (ICAC 5173, 2 cds,) includes the conductor’s last performing appearance at a public concert, the music by Vaughan Williams, his Seventh Symphony, or Sinfonia antartica, recorded at the Royal Festival Hall on 12^th October 1977. ICA’s excellent annotator Martin Cotton quotes a contemporary review by Anthony Payne (later celebrated for his performing version of Elgar’s unfinished Third Symphony), published in The Daily Telegraph, that relates “a quite magnificent interpretation in which the BBC Symphony Orchestra played magnificently … this performance proved once again how un-programmatic [the Symphony] really is, and despite sectional forms and picturesque texture [including a wind machine, RC], how organic as pure music and emotional experience.” The point worth making here is less that ‘antartica’ is un-programmatic than while listening you can append to it whatever programme you like, whether arctic, Cumbria, the Highlands, the further reaches of England or Wales, in fact anywhere. The important thing is not to feel guilty because the music’s title and your imagination don’t match.  

The blindingly vivid tam-tam and organ at 7:09 into the ‘Landscape’ third movement could as well be taking you into outer space, much as Boult’s 1973 BBC SO Proms performance of Holst’s The Planets does (here it’s admittedly more difficult to avoid inter-galactic associations), though war being war ‘Mars’ could mark an invasion from almost any location. There are numerous Boult versions of this unforgettable music, but none that (in my view) tops this concert rendition for drama. ‘Saturn’ ‘the Bringer of Old Age’, although bent and weary to start with, reaches a point (from 4:01) where it flatly refuses to “go gentle into that good night” (Dylan Thomas).

Other Holst masterpieces programmed are Hammersmith (BBC SO, 1973) and A Fugal Overture (LPO, 1971) which opens to the sort of jittery ebullience that anticipates John Adams’s ‘The Chairman Dances’ (Nixon in China) while the first CD concludes with an atmospheric 1969 LPO performance of The Banks of Green Willow by the World War One casualty George Butterworth (shot by a sniper at the Battle of the Somme in August 1916). I can never hear this lovely music without thinking of the tragedy of Butterworth’s death and what we as a nation lost, especially as Boult and his players empathise so strongly with the music.

And then there’s Walton First Symphony (BBC SO, 1975), a far cry from André Previn’s pile-driving LSO recording (RCA), no-nonsense Boult opting for transparency though those trilling horns that fill the air as the first movement climaxes still make their full effect. Certainly this is an admirable memorial to a great British conductor, some would say the greatest. But do you trust what I’ve just written? Can you trust critics at all, especially when they write a rave review then top it with another review of the same piece (in a different performance) that goes that extra mile? Viewed from this end, you just never know what’s around the corner. On July 20 on this blog, I rated a recording of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony by Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg under their current music director Aziz Shokhakimov (Warner Classics 5054197538513) as ‘great’. But then I tend to like my Tchaikovsky untarnished by affectation, and by ‘great’ I mean fired straight from the hip by a conductor who rarely misses his target.

On the face of it, Manfred Honeck takes the same view on his new Reference Recordings CD with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, on FR-752SACD, c£13.50. His extraordinarily detailed notes for the release leave no stone unturned to the extent of giving you disc timings for everything that happens, though he sometimes fights shy of annotating minor dynamic tweaks (ie, at 4:15 into the first movement, for example). The recorded sound is magnificent – rich (especially at the bass end of the spectrum), luminous and detailed at midrange and upwards …. and the playing, well by June last year (when these ‘live’ recordings were made) Honeck had built his Orchestra to a level that at its best sidles alongside orchestras from New York, Boston and Philadelphia. So why do I fight shy of awarding this remarkably assured production top marks? Maybe Honeck’s tendency to lecture extends beyond his pen to his baton and I too often find that he’s making points that are better left ‘unsaid’. In the face of such magnificent playing this is a relatively small point. Most punters will rejoice in a performance that is so powerful, so impassioned and so knowing. And Shokhakimov? Where does this leave him? With the windows wide open I’d say, the blackboard wiped clean of chalk and a lighter heart. But you may well disagree. There’s a fill-up, too, an orchestration, by Honeck and the orchestra’s arranger Tomás Ille, of five varied pieces (originally for string quartet) by the Prague-born Jewish composer Irwin Schulhoff.