The sound throughout is very serviceable, Lani Spahr’s AAD audio restoration is first-class, and the disc includes Vaughan Williams’s Thanksgiving for Victory (a live BBC broadcast from May 13, 1945), pealing with patriotism and WWII-triumph, featuring Elsie Suddaby (soprano), Valentine Dyall (narrator), George Thalben-Ball (organ), adult chorus & children’s choir, Sir Adrian conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra, as he does Serenade to Music (September 29, 1946) in its four-singer version (Isobel Baillie, Astra Desmond, Beveridge White & Harold Williams) rather than the sixteen vocalists originally enlisted for Sir Henry Wood, http://www.colinscolumn.com/rvw150-vaughan-williamss-serenade-to-music/, Boult leading a wonderful performance of this sublime Shakespeare-inspired masterpiece (words taken from The Merchant of Venice).

But the pearl is Boult in Boston, a riveting account of Job from Symphony Hall on January 26, 1946, the year that he would make the first of his four commercial recordings of ‘A Masque for Dancing’, culminating in his great LSO version for HMV, http://www.colinscolumn.com/from-the-anderson-archive-no-2-sir-adrian-boult-records-vaughan-williamss-job-with-the-lso-for-hmv/. Boult had introduced Job to the Salzburg Festival just prior to the War (Vienna Philharmonic) and following cessation of hostilities was in Boston, where he received a dedicated and fierily virtuoso response from the BSO (Koussevitzky, music director) – many depths and thrills – which hallmarked his lifelong conducting of this superb score. Not every detail reaches the microphones, but you know they are there, and the whole performance drips with authority, leaving no doubt that the players really relished encountering this music through a conductor who knew it inside out. I imagine that the beautiful violin solos are down to Richard Burgin (BSO concertmaster from 1920 to 1962); a standout saxophone, too. This Job is more than a supplement to Boult’s later tapings of this altogether-special opus. Somm Ariadne 5018.