I’ve often wondered about the validity of ‘authentic performance’ as a principle. Much as we well-meaningly try to recreate a St Matthew Passion along performing lines that Bach might have recognized (library shelves creak with scholarship relating to the relevant whys and wherefores), the all-too-obvious lack of sound sources is massively significant. We simply don’t know for sure how a Bach St Matthew, or cantata, or Brandenburg Concerto, might have come across in Bach’s day. It’s all hugely informed guesswork, no more than that.

Scroll forwards to the late Nineteenth Century and beyond, and with the advent of recording the situation changes dramatically. Elgar’s major works shine resplendently under his own baton, and so do Strauss’s. The violinists Adolf Busch and Bronislaw Huberman treat us to authoritative performances of the Brahms Concerto that recall Brahms’s violinist friend Joachim. Pupils of Clara Schumann (Fanny Davies for example) hint at the playing style of the century’s greatest piano teacher and we can hear Verdi’s Otello conducted by a man who played cello in the work’s 1887 world premiere at La Scala, Milan (Arturo Toscanini). Rachmaninov plays and conducts his own music with sovereign command, as does Stravinsky, while Bartók recorded significant portions of his piano music. All these documents are currently available either on CD or online, or both.

ENTER JOHN WILSON

Living performers ignore these models at their peril. Take John Wilson, one of the most remarkable conductors currently treading the international boards. Fans of the light music master Eric Coates, who recorded virtually all of his own major works, often more than once, will thrill to the composer’s brisk, newsreel-style of conducting, something Wilson has taken on board and that informs his numerous Coates CDs.

And there’s American showtime music, musicals and songbook showstoppers, that rely as much on the backing band as on the fronting singer.  Some 20 years ago Vocalion released a Wilson album of classic ballad arrangements by the American pianist, composer and conductor Paul Weston (CDSA 6808, c£11.00). They also had some Weston originals on their books so as I was at the time presenting morning programmes for BBC Radio 3 I was thrilled at the prospect of alternating a Weston ‘original’ with a Wilson/Weston ‘re-visit’ (using a quality ballad as played by both orchestras) just to prove the extent of Wilson’s achievement, its low-key intensity, the smoothness and expressivity of his string sound (slides in all the right places and never overdone), the ebb and flow of the musical line and a blend that never ironed out the music’s emotional message.

All was well until I received the nastiest email ever posted to me by a listener. The gentleman concerned spat his objection that I, a Radio 3 presenter, should inflict this ‘garbage’ on a cultured audience, that I should betray Reithian values in this way and that I should under no circumstances be allowed to continue. I was both flabbergasted and deeply hurt and concocted a reply which my producer (rightly) stamped on, insisting that such disrespectful rudeness should not be acknowledged, let alone graced by a personal reply. The gist of my answer would have been that if the BBC could tout ‘period performances’ of folk songs and dances, old popular ballads and the like, then why shouldn’t I do the same with the Great American Song book, illustrating how a skilful musician like Wilson could present a ‘period’ performance based on the precious recorded evidence at his disposal.  

A FABULOUS NEW OKLAHOMA!

With me no longer broadcasting and Wilson now rated a major talent, posterity has already proved my curmudgeonly correspondent wrong. The ultimate proof is The World Première Complete Recordings of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! starring Nathaniel Hackmann (Curly), Sierra Boggess (Laurey), Rodney Earl Clarke (Jud Fry), Jamie Parker (Will Parker), Louise Dearman (Ado Annie), Sandra Marvin (Aunt Eller), Nadim Naaman (Ali Hakim), Leo Roberts (Andrew Carnes), with the Oklahoma! Ensemble, Sinfonia of London, Wilson conducting on Chandos CHSA 5322 (2 SACDs) c£24.75, due for release on 15^th September.

Right from the Overture you’re catapulted in time, the medium-size orchestra here sounding even more ‘authentically American’ than it did on the Weston CD (I kept on imagining a Sinfonia ‘of New York’ rather than ‘of London’!), the acoustic of the Susie Sainsbury Theatre, Royal Academy of Music embracing Wilson’s expert players and singers like an intimate hug, the sound (producers Brian Couzens, Jonathan Allen) immediate in the way that the Capitol Oklahoma! soundtrack was though with added presence and, this being a ‘complete’ edition, with plenty of music that will be unfamiliar to most listeners. Nathaniel Hackmann and Sierra Boggess are perfectly suited to the lead rôles, sincerity personified in both cases.

Readers whose knowledge of the Musical is based on LP editions of the soundtrack and its first CD edition might be surprised by an extended ballet sequence (only the latest 78-minute Capitol soundtrack CD reissue includes it) which Wilson also features as well as scene changes and other additions (including a longer Overture). And there’s the ingenuity of Rodgers’s music, at its height ‘Lonely Room’ (dramatically sung by Rodney Earl Clarke), a brief if haunting premonition of the ‘Soliloquy’ from Carousel.

And on it goes, stitched together with an inborn understanding of pace, texture, the shape of a phrase and what that phrase means in both emotional and musical terms. The work’s close is miraculous. Beam up from disc 2 track 11, a sassy brief instrumental version of ‘The Cowman and the Farmer’ (with banjo) then follow through as one tenderising hit follows another. Suddenly I imagine myself leaving the theatre under a starry night sky, my head full of music perfectly realised, my heart simultaneously happy and sad. Happy because of an elevating musical experience, sad because what I’ve just experienced is more to do with my past than with my future. But that’s nostalgia for you. I’m grateful all the same. So here’s hoping that Wilson and his gifted line-up will soon treat us to what in my book is the greatest musical of them all, Carousel.