cilgwyn, there is a very lengthy discussion of the timings of Arnold's Seventh Symphony on this forum......somewhere ::) The search engine is no help in finding it but it is somewhere-I should know since I wrote the initial and very, very lengthy post ;D ;D I think that I also posted about it on Musicweb but we are going back a few years!!
Arnold's timing for that first broadcast performance was quite extraordinary. In fact he effectively turned the symphony into a different work! Every conductor since seems to have ignored the composer's own performance and since he was present (I think) at the recording of the Naxos version one can only presume that he disavowed that earlier reading.
....and the recording on here to which you refer was one of those made by me ::) It was one of hundreds I made directly from the radio to tape using an open microphone and in those days if the radio was not tuned absolutely exactly then there could be interference (as in picking up police radio). This is an unfortunate feature of a number of recordings I made in those distant years.......40 years ago in fact ::)
So.....mea culpa ;D
Thank you for your reply. I will look for those posts,and the one's on Musicweb. I actually found the interpolations from the police rather amusing! ;D As I said,I used to love twiddling around with my radios as a youngster. The police actually shared the vhf band with the BBC radio stations back then!! Yes,an absolutely snail paced performance. Unlike his recording of the Fourth,I'm not sure there is any real merit to this approach. Astonishing to compare the timings of all the commercial recordings with Arnold's. I think his 1960 performance of the Fourth and 1968 Sixth are well worth listening to,though.
