Poor Malcolm Sargent
– the butt of many jokes and the recipient
of the wrath of orchestral musicians.
I have been told tales by some who worked
with him and under him. One can never
forget Beecham naming Sargent "Flash
Harry" because of his dapper taste
in clothes. Then there were Beecham’s
more scurrilous comments that Herbert
von Karajan was "a musical Malcolm
Sargent". When Sargent’s car was
shot at, whilst he was on tour in the
middle east in 1938, Beecham said "I
had no idea the Arabs were so musical!"
But it wasn’t Beecham,
but a daily newspaper, which gave the
public one of its best jokes with regard
to the conductor. Sargent was conducting
Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony, in
a live radio broadcast at Helsinki University,
at the exact time of the composer’s
death which produced the unfortunate
newspaper headline: "Sibelius dies
after hearing Sargent conduct Fifth
Symphony". It must have been a
field day for his detractors.
Despite these barbs,
we must not forget that although Sargent
and Beecham were never close, they did,
jointly, form the London Philharmonic
Orchestra in 1932. It was Sargent who
made their first recordings (19/21 September
1932 at the Kingsway Hall) leaving Beecham
at the helm to conduct the opening concert
on 7 October 1932 .
It was his comments
concerning the musician’s lot which
really brought him lifelong hatred from
the profession. In 1936, the Daily Telegraph
interviewed Sargent about musicians’
employment rights: "… as soon as
a man thinks he is in his orchestral
job for life, with a pension waiting
for him at the end of it, he tends to
lose something of his supreme fire.
He ought to give of his lifeblood with
every bar he plays. Directly a man gets
blasé or does not give of his
very best he ought to go." And
pensions should only be paid, "at
the end of the musicians life when he
has poured out ungrudgingly his whole
strength." Jack Brymer remembers
that "Sargent was hated by orchestras
overnight", and thirty years later
there were musicians who would still
not speak to him (Richard Aldous: Tunes
of Glory: The Life of Malcolm Sargent
(Hutchinson 2001, Pimlico 2002)).
On a lighter note,
in 1944, when the "musical"
Malcolm Sargent met the real one, he
said that "When the Fuhrer gets
to London, you will be shot." Ever
the English gentleman, Sargent replied,
"Thank you. How gratifying to be
on the wanted list of the SS".
But despite his detractors and his gaffe
with the press, Sargent became the darling
of the public, keeper of the faith in
a series of recordings of the works
of Gilbert and Sullivan, chief conductor
of the BBC Symphony Orchestra for seven
years (1950/1957), Conductor-in-Chief
of the BBC Proms (from 1957 to the end
of his life) and one of the leading
choral conductors of his time. A world
figure – he conducted in Australia and
America as well as Scandinavia, Europe
and the Far East – he was welcomed wherever
he appeared, until the 1950s when a
change came about in music with the
desire for everything to be new, at
all costs. True, he was a vain man,
a ladies’ man to be sure, a raconteur,
but over the forty years (yes, it’s
forty years) since his death there has
never been a major reappraisal of his
art. Above all, whatever else he was,
Malcolm Sargent was a musician.
Sargent certainly made
a lot of records – starting in 1924
with excerpts from Vaughan Williams’s,
then new, opera Hugh the Drover.
This was with William Anderson, Frederick
Collier, Tudor Davies, Peter Dawson,
Mary Lewis, Constance Willis with a
chorus and orchestra. The coupling in
recent years was Vaughan Williams conducting
his own ballet music Old King Cole
and The Wasps Overture on Pearl
GEMM CD 9468 (1999). Sargent and the
BNOC had recently premiered Hugh
the Drover. If you look on the Amazon
website there’s over thirty pages of
listings of his recordings! Some years
ago Dutton gave us a CD of Sargent conducting
the (then) Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra
in English music, which included a lovely
Lark Ascending (with David Wise)
and a very fine Hymn of Jesus
which transcends the 1944 recording
techniques (Dutton CDAX 8012). It’s
impossible to forget his Dream of
Gerontius (the 1945 performance
with Heddle Nash, coupled with Tortelier
and Sargent’s 1953 recording of the
Cello Concerto (Testament SBT 2025)
or the 1954 performance with Richard
Lewis, coupled with Belshazzar’s
Feast (Classics For Pleasure 5859042)
or Elijah (Classics For Pleasure
5759752) which are essentials of the
catalogue.
Richard Aldous’s book,
from which I quoted earlier, should
have gone some way towards a rehabilitation
of Sargent, but it didn’t and I wonder
at his real standing in light of contemporary
musical life.
Sargent’s story is
that of the local boy made good. He
played piano and organ when young and
became an ARCO in 1912. He was apprenticed
for two years to Dr Haydn Keeton, Master
of Music at Peterborough Cathedral,
then, in 1914, he moved to St Mary’s
Church at Melton Mowbray, as organist.
In 1919, Sargent formed the Melton Mowbray
Operatic Society and conducted Gilbert
and Sullivan’s Patience in 1920
and Iolanthe the following year.
By this time he was composing, had gained
his doctorate - at 24, the youngest
ever in Britain. For the Queen’s Hall
Orchestra’s visit to Leicester in 1921
he had been asked to write an overture.
Impressions of a Windy Day (available
on ASV Sanctuary CDWHL 2113, played
by the Royal Ballet Sinfonia, conducted
by Gavin Sutherland) was the result
and Sargent got to conduct it. Eight
months later he conducted it at the
Queen’s Hall in London. In 1926 and
1927 he was conductor of the Llandudno
Pier Company Orchestra, giving the seaside
Bantock, Beethoven, Elgar, Schubert
and Wagner, as well as his own Nocturne
and Scherzo, Valsette and
his setting of Shelley’s Ode to a
Skylark (see Kenneth Young: Music’s
Great Days in the Spas and Watering
Places, MacMillan, 1968). Thereafter,
his career is well documented – the
LPO, the Courtauld/Sargent concerts,
the Proms, and the BBC.
Despite the fact that
Sargent made a fine series of recordings
of the Beethoven Piano Concertos, with
Schnabel, it’s easy to forget that he
was not just a conductor of English
and choral music. Therefore, Hurrah
for this disk!
There’s much to be
admired and enjoyed in this performance
of Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony
– the excellent ensemble in the
staccato chords of the slow introduction
to the first movement, the high tension
as the music builds to the Allegro
vivace, which simply bursts out
of the speakers with life; high spirits
abound. Let’s not forget that this is
only one of Beethoven’s two truly light-hearted
mature symphonies – even the Pastoral
has a storm in it. The slow movement
is never allowed to slip into romantic
gesture and the scherzo goes off like
a rocket, but is shorn of the repeat
of the second part of the scherzo. The
finale returns to high spirits with
some wonderfully bucolic bassoon solos
and the exposition is repeated! I suppose
that this was done as the movement was
bound to run to two sides of a 78 disc
and there was sufficient time. The first
movement would not have fitted and it’s
a joy to hear those four first time
bars and to have more of this fabulous
music-making. I haven’t enjoyed this
symphony so much in years! Full marks
for the interpretation. I can’t help
thinking how frustrating it must have
been, when listening to the original
78s, to have the music stop at the end
of each side and have to wait those
precious few moments it took to turn
the record over before being able to
rejoin Sargent and his players in sheer
pleasure.
The Fifth Symphony
isn’t quite as successful a performance
for one simple reason: Sargent sees
the first twenty-four bars of the first
movement as an introduction, before
the music can really get going. And
get going it does – until the exposition
is repeated (bravo) – when we get the
portentous application of the brakes
for the first twenty four bars. Then
again, for the first four bars of the
development section (bars 125/128) the
brakes are applied, before the music
once more takes off. And so on, throughout
the movement, whenever the famous four
notes appear on full orchestra everything
comes to a standstill. Bars 303/306
contain the usual reorchestration of
the bassoon part for the horns. However,
despite this rather annoying habit,
this is thrilling stuff and one is quite
carried away by the sheer verve of the
playing and the interpretation – the
wind band is especially fine. The slow
movement is very well paced, with only
a rather large rallentando heralding
the end of the 78 side. The scherzo
races along, with lots of fun in the
manic trio with the fugal string entries
- exciting bass and cello playing here.
In general, the timpani have not recorded
well, but when it really matters, as
in the transition music from scherzo
to finale, the drums are most
telling and very well captured. Then
comes the excitement and culmination
of the musical journey. Sargent pushes
the music along and, as you’d expect,
he doesn’t repeat the exposition although
I do have the feeling that there might
have been room on the 78s for it. It’s
a shame it wasn’t repeated for this
is such a good performance that I would
have welcomed more music.
I do have a couple
of niggles about these transfers.
In the second and fourth
movements of the Fourth Symphony
it feels as if the 78s’ surface sound
has been faded out too quickly, just
before the end of the reverberation
of the final chord. OK, a small point
but a significant one – it disturbs
the listening experience. In the Fifth
Symphony, in bar 123 of the slow
movement – which is obviously the moment
where the first 78 side ended – there
is a long-held chord followed by two
pizzicato chords. The second chord is
clearly audible, but not the first one
– I am sure it is there, but under the
held chord, masking it, and making it
all but inaudible. I tried many different
ways of trying to hear if there was
a fault and I am still not 100% sure
what is going on. Again, a small matter,
perhaps, but it’s disturbing not being
able to hear what is essentially the
start of a new section. It has the feel
of a beat of music being missing. What
happens in the finale is much more disturbing.
In bar 63 Beethoven writes a D major
crotchet chord for the full orchestra,
followed by three crotchets rest, then,
in bar 64, a G major chord, for violas,
bassoons and clarinets held for three
crotchets (with a C natural passing
note in the first bassoon). In this
performance, in bar 63 the silence is
only one and a half crotchets in length.
However, in the repeat of this section,
in bar 272 the crotchet G major chord
- we have changed key by now - is followed
by a single crotchet rest before passing
on to a C major chord (in the first
inversion) in bar 273. The question
must be asked, is this Sargent’s doing
or is it an anomaly which has occurred
in the transfer? The second time feels
as if it happens over the side-break,
but the first feels as if it is a natural
progression of the interpretation. Whatever
it is, it upsets the forward momentum
of the music and I do feel that
something is missing. On first hearing,
with the pause being of an irregular
number of beats, it is really disturbing.
If it’s Sargent’s interpretation then
so be it and we have to put up with
it, no matter how frustrating it may
be, but if it is a fault of the transfer
then it should be rectified. I make
no apologies for being technical in
this discussion.
Whatever my worries
these are electrifying performances:
alive, alert, brimming with energy and
fire, but with poetry in the slow movements.
There are no frills in these readings;
Sargent is truly the servant of the
composer. What is more, I haven’t been
as excited by Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony
in a long time.
If this wasn’t enough,
there’s a delightful performance of
Grieg’s Lyric Suite to complete
the disc. The final March of the
Dwarfs is a real rollicking affair.
Interestingly, the
78 surface sound has been left on the
CD between the movements of the Lyric
Suite, but not between the movements
of the Beethoven symphonies. I would
have welcomed the continuation of the
sound all the way through each work:
it would have been an aid to concentration
instead of, in a way, being given four
separate segments for each work.
The original recordings
were engineered by Kenneth Wilkinson
in the Kingsway Hall and they are very
clear, giving a good balance of the
various sections of the orchestra. The
winds and brass, when playing in consort,
are especially well captured. The usual
losers are the oboes which, when playing
solo, are too quiet and distant, but
they always make their presence felt
in a wind tutti, and the timpani, except
where mentioned earlier.
Barry Coward’s transfers
are fine, with a little surface noise
remaining, thus allowing the upper frequencies
to register. This is how transfers from
78 should be.
I cannot welcome this
disk too highly. It’s great music-making
which should be heard by anyone interested
in the art of performance and everyone
interested in music.
Sargent’s Beethoven?
No. Our Beethoven, thanks to
Sargent.
Bob Briggs
National Symphony Orchestra/Sir Malcolm
Sargent 
