Good morning Colin,
A very interesting Halloween selection! … That ‘Psycho’ editing of clips was new to me, so they were interesting to see.
As to “Night on Bare Mountain,” do you have Boult’s ‘Readers Digest’ recording in the Column? … It was his only recording of any of Mussorgsky’s music and you can tell from his hair-raising performance that he was glad to get away from the usual kind of things EMI asked him to record. You will also hear “emendations” in this version too, being the ideas of producer Charles Gerhardt …
Here’s a real curiosity which may also have Halloween connections but I’ll leave Stokowski to tell you all about it! …
Happy listening!
Edward
Wow, Boult’s take on Night on a Bare Mountain is terrifying, emendations aside. Terrific. Thanks, Edward and Colin.
Boult/Gerhardt took out the Rimsky fanfares around 3 minutes in (makes sense because they always sounded out of place to me). Nice added tam tam and other percussion effects. The playing of the orchestra is as good as one would expect from the Gerhardt/Sid Sax pickup ensemble (i.e. superb). Really wonderful engineering too (likely Wilkinson). It’s a terrific performance. Boult was a very fine conductor and this is definitely outside his usual repertoire.