Between 1993 and 2001 Beulah established itself as an award winning and highly acclaimed classical music and middle of the road compact disc label. Now we are re-issuing the best performances from our back catalogue at £9.95 each (only £7.99 if downloaded from iTunes). To listen to track samples click on the disc's iTunes link.
Our compact discs are played on BBC radio from time to time. We keep a list of discs played on the BBC.
Anthony Collins has featured promiently in the Beulah catalogue since we started releasing compact discs in 1993.
Listen To Anthony Collins
14PD8 Collins Sibelius Cycle
Recorded between 1952 and 1955 the Hastings born Anthony Collins takes the London Symphony Orchestra on a journey through all seven symphonies. At times you can sense the orchestra are on the edge of their seats.
The four disc set contains:
Anthony Collins' 1952-55 Sibelius cycle with the LSO for Decca has acquired something of a cult status over the decades. Personally, I've long held mixed feelings about this much vaunted venture so was profoundly grateful for the chance to renew acquaintance and see if my reactions would alter. Of course Kenneth Wilkinson's hugely vivid and tastefully balanced Kingsway Hall sound remains an enormous pleasure in itself. Beulah's thankfully non-interventionist transfers are slightly less smooth but have marginally more body and projection than Tony Hawkins' exemplary previous efforts for this same label.
...Collins' readings possess a red-blooded fevour and thrusting energy to which many will rightly respond.
"This is music that should be in the hands of everyone" - Steve Nystrom in Classical Disc Digest April 1994 "The recordings thatb hhelped to bring Sibelius in from the cold in the fifties have stood the test of time" wrote Andrew Clements in The Guardian 14 Feb. 1997
The brilliance, clarity and presence of these recordings made by the legendary balance engineer Kenneth Wilkinson spurred the remastering team lead by Simon Heyworth at Super Audio Mastering to reproduce on these compact discs a sound which when played through a single loudspeaker either directly in front of the listener or from a corner reflex cabinet will propel the listener into the Kingsway Hall with its live acoustic, and the London Symphony orchestra of the 1950s. They sound pretty good through two speakers, but the advantage of using a single speaker is that you will hear the original balance without any phase problems or side effects.
available as a boxed set, four discs for the price of three. £29.85 Place an order now . [ORDER ON LINE][iTunes]
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4PD15 Elgar's Falstaff
On this disc Anthony Collins conducts performances of Elgar's symphonic study Falstaff, Introduction and Allegro for Strings and the Serenade for Strings, whilst Sir Malcolm Sargent conducts three marches, Pomp and Circumstance Nos 1 and 4 and Imperial March.
"Professional to his fingertips, Collins presides over a beautifully prepared, shrewdly paced traversal. He secures a commendably ebullient response from the LSO, and my only nagging misgiving surrounds an ever so slight want of temperament; the seam of vulnerability that surfaces with a vengeance in th epilogue is not readily quarried here. Apart from an isolated patch of pre-echo Beulah's painstaking restoration of Decca's strikingly full-bodied and crisp "ffrr" tapes must be deemed a conspicuous sucess." Andrew Achenbach Grampohone November 2007
"Collins' instinct for the dramatic from his experience in films stands him in excellent stead in Falstaff. This is a very good version indeed, worthy to stand alongside the fine accounts by Tate and Rattle. " Elgar Society Journal Nov. 1995.
"Few match Collins in the way his timing helps you visualize the story behind each incident. This is an invaluable offering to remind us of the mastery of a conductor whose achievement was never fully appreciated in this country in his lifetime. " Gramophone Feb 1996.
Jonathan Swain on CD Review BBC Radio Three 10 November 2007 said:
On Anthony Collins conducting Falstaff: "A great many details here tell of Collins the film composer. They can be very subtle though never unsubtle. The art is knowing how far to go."..."everything superbly animated. It leaps out at you."
4PD15 retails at £9.95(only £7.99 if downloaded from iTunes).
Place an order now . [ORDER ON LINE][iTunes]
or phone Priory Records 01525 377566
PayPal customers use this box
This album is not available for sale to North America
Firstly, the programme of this CD is a near perfect introduction to the pleasures of British music - counting Grainger as an honorary countryman - and secondly, the performance of some of these works is eye-opening to say the least.
The Overture di ballo, which was written for the 1870 Birmingham Festival, is almost a conspectus of Sullivan's style that was to come finally to fruition the following year when the first of the Savoy Operas, Thespis, was heard in London. The Overture simply sparkles - it is a true gem, and Collins gives one of the best performances of this piece that I have heard. Great stuff!
Shepherd's Hey is a short, but quite amazing, miniature - especially in Collins' rendering. It was based on the folk tune 'The Keel Row' and incidentally, the score was dedicated to Edvard Grieg. It is certainly a piece to 'chase away care'.
I listened to Collins' version of the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis twice for this review. There is definitely something magical and moving here that I have not quite heard before in this work. And this is even allowing for the half-century plus years that have passed since it was first recorded. Perhaps it is this version that best explains to me what so impressed the young Herbert Howells all those years ago at the Three Choirs Festival. It is like a paean of praise for, and a meditation on, the soil of the West Country and it sons.
For me, the Delius pieces are old friends. I recall an old LP from the 1950s that I found somewhere - probably the school music library. It was Collins version of The Walk to Paradise Garden and The Song of Summer with which I first discovered Delius. And I guess that it is this sound-scape that I have carried with me in my musical mind ever since: it is my touchstone for all subsequent recordings that I have heard of these pieces. In fact it was not until a wee while after hearing these recordings that I discovered the wonderful Tommy Beecham records. Yet even these did not usurp what I had heard of Collins and the LSO. The Song of Summer is one of the pieces that Delius's amanuensis, Eric Fenby, helped set down on manuscript paper. And it is surely a well-known tale that the elder composer asked the young Fenby to imagine the view from the sea-cliffs of Yorkshire on a hot summer's day. To my ear this is one of the best 'landscape' tone-poems in the literature and certainly deserves its place in many an anthology of English music. Collins version is totally convincing, in both its intimate moments and the huge, almost overpowering climaxes.
This is a fine CD that would make a good introduction to English music for anyone who had yet to make that step. The sound is not perfect - but yet again I am just a little younger than these recordings and neither am I! However, what makes it a fantastic disc is the sheer beauty of the sound, the attention to detail and the depth of engendered emotion - especially in the Delius.
Robert Cowen writes in Gramophone for December 2008:
Beulah's star release has Anthony Collins conduct a programme of "British" music. Rarely have I encountered a more sensitively nuanced reading of Vaughan Williams Tallis Fantasia, with some beautifully judged perspectives, or more luminously played Delius (the "Walk" from Romeo and Juliet and A Song of Summer). All are with the LSO where as the Sullivan's Overture di Ballo (a superb perfomance), Gardiner's Shepherd's Fennell's Dance and Grainger's Shepherd's Hey are with the New Symphony Orchestra. Beulah adds Vaughan Williams' Greensleveves Fantasia, another memorable LSO recording. The transfers are first rate.
