Sir Thomas Beecham & Alan Blumlein

Sir Thomas Beecham.

Sir Thomas Beecham (29 April 1879 – 8 March 1961) was an English conductor and impresario best known for his association with the London Philharmonic and the Royal Philharmonic orchestras. He was also closely associated with the Liverpool Philharmonic and Hallé orchestras.

From the early 20th century until his death, Beecham was a major influence on the musical life of Britain and, according to the BBC, was Britain's first international conductor.

Born to a rich industrial family, Beecham began his career as a conductor in 1899. He used his access to the family fortune to finance opera from the 1910s until the start of the Second World War, staging seasons at Covent Garden, Drury Lane and His Majesty's Theatre with international stars, his own orchestra and a wide repertoire. Among the works he introduced to England were Richard Strauss's Elektra, Salome and Der Rosenkavalier and three operas by Frederick Delius.

Together with his younger colleague Malcolm Sargent, Beecham founded the London Philharmonic, and he conducted its first performance at the Queen's Hall in 1932.

In 1931, Beecham was approached by the rising young conductor Malcolm Sargent with a proposal to set up a permanent, salaried orchestra with a subsidy guaranteed by Sargent's patrons, the Courtauld family. Originally Sargent and Beecham envisaged a reshuffled version of the London Symphony Orchestra, but the LSO, a self-governing co-operative, balked at weeding out and replacing underperforming players.

In 1932 Beecham lost patience and agreed with Sargent to set up a new orchestra from scratch. The London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO), as it was named, consisted of 106 players including a few young musicians straight from music college, many established players from provincial orchestras, and 17 of the LSO's leading members. The principals included Paul Beard, George Stratton, Anthony Pini, Gerald Jackson, Léon Goossens, Reginald Kell, James Bradshaw and Marie Goossens.

By the early 1930s, Beecham had secured substantial control of the Covent Garden opera seasons. Wishing to concentrate on music-making rather than management, he assumed the role of artistic director, and Geoffrey Toye was recruited as managing director.

In 1933, Tristan und Isolde with Frida Leider and Lauritz Melchior was a success, and the season continued with the Ring cycle and nine other operas. The 1934 season featured Conchita Supervía in La Cenerentola, and Lotte Lehmann and Alexander Kipnis in the Ring. Clemens Krauss conducted the British première of Strauss's Arabella.

During 1933 and 1934, Beecham repelled attempts by John Christie to form a link between Christie's new Glyndebourne Festival and the Royal Opera House. Beecham and Toye fell out over the latter's insistence on bringing in a popular film star, Grace Moore, to sing Mimi in La bohème. The production was a box-office success, but an artistic failure.

From 1926 to 1932, Beecham made more than 70 discs, including an English version of Gounod's Faust and the first of three recordings of Handel's Messiah.

He began recording with the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 1933, making more than 150 discs for Columbia, including music by Mozart, Rossini, Berlioz, Wagner, Handel, Beethoven, Brahms, Debussy and Delius.

Among the most prominent of his pre-war recordings was the first complete recording of Mozart's The Magic Flute with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, made for HMV and supervised by Walter Legge in Berlin in 1937–38, a set described by Alan Blyth in Gramophone magazine in 2006 as having "a legendary status".

Sir Thomas Beecham and Alan Blumlein.

Sir Thomas Beecham and Alan Blumlein collaborated in the early 1930s on pioneering stereo recordings. Blumlein used his newly developed stereo recording techniques to capture Beecham conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra rehearsing Mozart's Jupiter Symphony in January 1934 at Abbey Road Studios.

This recording, along with other experimental stereo recordings, aimed to demonstrate the potential of Blumlein's stereo technology, which included patents for stereo records, films, and surround sound.

In January 1934, Blumlein used his stereo cutting equipment at Abbey Road Studios to record Sir Thomas Beecham and the London Philharmonic Orchestra as they rehearsed Mozart's Symphony No. 41, also known as the Jupiter Symphony.

This recording was one of several experimental stereo recordings made by Blumlein to demonstrate his system to the fledgling audio and film industries.

Sir Thomas Beecham, a renowned conductor, played a crucial role by participating in these early stereo experiments, lending his orchestra and conducting skills to the project.

The Formative Years - Pioneering Sound Recordings from the 1930s

London Philharmonic Orchestra, Sir Thomas Beecham & Alan Dower Blumlein

Release Date: 28 September 2009

Catalogue No: LPO0040

Label: LPO

Two of the most significant pioneering experiments in sound recording, stereophonic sound and recording on tape, involved the London Philharmonic Orchestra and its founder Sir Thomas Beecham.

At Beecham’s famous mono recording session of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony in 1934, engineers experimented simultaneously with stereo sound and during a tour of Germany in 1936 part of one of the Orchestra’s concerts was recorded using the revolutionary invention of tape.

The results of these landmark moments in the Orchestra’s history are restored here for the first time in full.

Astonishingly when Beecham started conducting in the early 1900s, Mozart’s music was hardly known in the UK. With the single-mindedness for which he was renowned, the conductor set out to change this perspective, giving performances that bore out his claim that the two virtues necessary for a successful presentation of the music were ‘the maximum of virility, coupled with the maximum of delicacy’.

Nowhere did he combine these two elements more effectively than in his approach to Mozart’s symphonies, where his bold, masculine phrasing, sense of line and fastidious attention to detail virtually created a new style.

Beecham was a lifelong champion of the music of Mozart, and his recordings of nine of Mozart’s symphonies between 1934 and 1940 with the LPO are still regarded as benchmark recordings to this day.

This is the first time that the results of Alan Blumlein’s experiments with stereophonic sound and the Orchestra have been heard in full.

From his return to England at the end of the Second World War until his final recordings in 1959, Beecham continued his early association with HMV and British Columbia, who had merged to form EMI.

From 1955 his EMI recordings made in London were recorded in stereo. He also recorded in Paris, with his own RPO and with the Orchestra National de la Radiodiffusion Française, though the Paris recordings were in mono until 1958.

For EMI, Beecham recorded two complete operas in stereo, Die Entführung aus dem Serail and Carmen.

Beecham's relations with fellow British conductors were not always cordial. Sir Henry Wood regarded him as an upstart and was envious of his success; the scrupulous Sir Adrian Boult found him "repulsive" as a man and a musician; and Sir John Barbirolli mistrusted him.

Sir Malcolm Sargent worked with him in founding the London Philharmonic and was a friend and ally, but he was the subject of unkind, though witty, digs from Beecham who, for example, described the image-conscious Herbert von Karajan as "a kind of musical Malcolm Sargent".

Beecham's relations with foreign conductors were often excellent. He did not get on well with Arturo Toscanini, but he liked and encouraged Wilhelm Furtwängler, admired Pierre Monteux, fostered Rudolf Kempe as his successor with the RPO, and was admired by Fritz Reiner, Otto Klemperer and Karajan.

Despite his lordly drawl, Beecham remained a Lancastrian at heart. "In my county, where I come from, we're all a bit vulgar, you know, but there is a certain heartiness – a sort of bonhomie about our vulgarity – which tides you over a lot of rough spots in the path. But in Yorkshire, in a spot of bother, they're so damn-set-in-their-ways that there's no doing anything with them!"