Malcolm Sargent – Complete Decca Recordings (16CD Box Set)

From 78 to stereo, this is Sir Malcolm Sargent’s Decca legacy reissued complete, including several recordings new to CD.

Sargent’s broad repertoire and warm rapport with audiences made him easy to underestimate. Yet Schnabel and Toscanini, among other celebrated foreign musicians, held him in the highest regard. This new Eloquence collection of the conductor’s Decca recordings should help modern listeners to understand and share Schnabel’s admiration.

In his booklet essay, David Patmore tells the story of Sargent’s early career as an organist and rapid rise as a conductor in his 20s, leading the Ballets russes, Wagner’s Mastersingers and a popular series of children’s concerts. Having made records since the 1920s, he was an experienced conductor in the studio by the time he began recording for Decca, directly after the war.

These 78-era sessions included symphonies by Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert as well as overtures by Rossini and Suppé, several of them never reissued until now. They reveal what a direct and unmannered interpreter Sargent could be in canon repertoire, coaching orchestras to achieve the highest technical standards. He was always a dynamic conductor of English music: his Decca recordings of Holst’s Planets, Elgar’s Enigma Variations and Coronation Marches have lost none of their rhythmic drive and intensity.

Sargent’s concerto sessions with Sir Clifford Curzon (in Rawsthorne), Max Rostal (Bartók), Ida Haendel (Mendelssohn) and Ruggero Ricci (Tchaikovsky and Dvorak) bear out his reputation as a sympathetic accompanist. ‘Messiah and Mikado’ was how the conductor summed up his strengths in the eyes of the wider public: the box includes rare 1946 recordings of Handel arias and choruses featuring Kathleen Ferrier, as well as a live 1949 recording of Sargent accompanying her in his own orchestration of Brahms’ Four Serious Songs.

Having comprehensively covered the light operas of Gilbert and Sullivan for HMV, Sargent remade both Yeoman of the Guard and Princess Ida for Decca in 1964–65. These records movingly document the final chapter in the conductor’s career-long affinity with G&S, now leading the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and first-rate casts which include Elizabeth Harwood and Donald Adams in the principal roles of both works. Sargent was a conductor for all seasons, and this Eloquence box takes the measure of him.