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SOMM Recordings continues it's much-admired and long-running series The Beecham Collection with it's 35th of live recordings by Sir Thomas Beecham and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. The recording highlights the operatic side of Beecham with orchestral excerpts from Les Troyens and La Damnation de Faust by Hector Berlioz, and Tannhäuser, Parsifal, Götterdämmerung, and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg by Richard Wagner. Producer and audio engineer Lani Spahr, whose work for SOMM on Elgar from the Archives has been described by Gramophone Magazine as InchastoundingInch and Inchrevelatory,Inch is once again responsible for the audio restoration on this .The professional debut of Sir Thomas Beecham, Bart., C.H. took place on 6 December 1899 in St Helen's Town Hall when he was twenty years old. He conducted the Hungarian March from La Damnation de Faust by Berlioz with the Hallé Orchestra, and the music of Berlioz was to become one of the cornerstones of his repertoire for the next six decades. This present recording of the Hungarian March is a gloriously uninhibited performance that brought the house down at the end of a 1955 concert at the Royal Festival Hall.That concert also included two excerpts from Les Troyens by Berlioz. The Prelude to The Trojans at Carthage is followed by The Royal Hunt and Storm, with the Oxford Bach Choir providing the brief choral contribution from Nymphs, Sylvans, and Fauns. These performances are remarkable for their atmospheric poetry in the slower sections and the rampaging energy in the faster music.During the same year as his professional debut, a young Beecham made his pilgrimage to Bayreuth, and he became an enthusiastic, instinctual conductor of Wagner's music. The renowned music critic Neville Cardus once noted that, while German conductors tended to take a reflective and philosophical approach in interpreting Wagner, Sir Thomas c
