Wilfred Josephs and his Symphonies

[Dundonnell]

Many thanks to northern for drawing our attention to the off-air recording of the Wilfred Josephs (admittedly rather grim) Symphony No.4 on You Tube (which I have now successfully downloaded).

A contributer to YT in a comment on the Fourth Symphony laments the fact that the Symphonies Nos. 3 "Philadelphia" and No.7 "Winter" have been lost my the BBC. It would be nice to point out to him that both these symphonies are in our British Music Archive here. I do not know how to make a comment on YT so if somebody else feels so inclined I am sure that the person would be hugely grateful :)

My principal reason for posting here however is that there are two recordings of the Symphony No.1 on YT-the premiere performance of the 1974-75 revised version of the symphony by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under John Poole and another version by the BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra under Meredith Davies. The version in our Archive on this site is advertised as the Davies but I think that it might in fact be the Poole. Now that I have downloaded both versions from YT I am no longer sure which performance is the one in our Archive but I think that it is the Poole rather than the Davies.

....on the other hand, of course, the people who uploaded the symphony to YT might have the two versions confused ::)

John ??? ???

[Gauk]

I was rather angry with an article in the newspaper earlier this year about the BBC TV series "The Great War" (1964) and how it was memorably enhanced by the theme music played by the BBC Northern Orchestra conducted by George Hurst - as if they could have played anything, and the composer made no difference. No mention of Josephs. It is this absurd modern habit of arranging everything by "artist" that does the damage.

[northern]

I've just posted the first two piano concertos in the downloads section.

[Dundonnell]

Huge thanks for these two uploads :)