Sir Thomas Beecham and Royal Philharmonic Orchestra – Symphony No. 6 in C major (Atterberg) (1928)

To mark the centenary – in November 1928 – of Schubert’s death, Columbia decided to hold a competition which offered a grand international prize plus separate prizes for winners in each of ten zones. According to Roland Gelatt in ‘The Fabulous Phonograph’:

”Originally, the contest called for completion of Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ Symphony. This roused a howl of protest from musicians on both sides of the Atlantic who waxed indignant at the very thought of a contemporary composer presuming to graft a conclusion on to Schubert’s masterpiece. In deference to these objections the rules of the contest were changed so as to require merely an original orchestral work conceived ‘as an apotheosis of the lyrical genius of Schubert.”’

The grand international prize of two thousand guineas was won with Kurt Atterberg’s Symphony No. 6 in C major, the first public performance of which was given in Manchester on 8 November 1928 by the Halle Orchestra conducted by Sir Hamilton Harty . Beecham soon followed with the first London performance: his only public performance of the work. It was Beecham who was – before the premiere – to conduct the recording of the Symphony made by Columbia in the Scala Theatre, London, on 12 August 1928.

The movements are:

00:00 1st movement – Allegro
08:53 2nd movement – Adagio
20:23 3rd movement – Finale: Vivace

Wikipedia tells the story of the judging:

”From 19 to 23 June 1928 the 30 winning scores from the ten national zones were evaluated in Vienna by the International jury. This body consisted of one delegate from each of the zones plus an eleventh juror appointed in Vienna…It was agreed that all the completions of Schubert’s Unfinished should be ruled out and the judging devoted only to the original works. The sole international prize was awarded to the Sixth Symphony of Kurt Atterberg…

”Kurt Atterberg’s Symphony was eventually reviewed with a fair amount of derision by international critics as a particularly weak and derivative specimen of contemporary music…[A] report in The New York Times (29 November 1928)…suggested that the jury were divided on four scores which were considered outstanding but eventually rejected as ‘in a modernistic vein inappropriate to the occasion’,and that Atterberg’s Symphony was awarded the prize as the best of the others, with (it seems) five jurors dissenting and the deadlock broken by the casting vote of [the chairman] Glazunov. Yet Atterberg’s Symphony No. 6…is by no means the mere pastiche that it was represented as in contemporary reviews; and one might have expected that its rather prominent vein of polytonality would have rendered it equally ‘inappropriate to the occasion’.”

I’m not a particular fan of the Symphony, but I felt it deserved a place on this site.

From Wikipedia: Sir Thomas Beecham, 2nd Baronet, CH (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 the 1940s he worked for three years in the United States where he was music director of the Seattle Symphony and conducted at the Metropolitan Opera. After his return to Britain, he founded the Royal Philharmonic in 1946 and conducted it until his death in 1961.

Beecham’s repertoire was eclectic, sometimes favouring lesser-known composers over famous ones. His specialities included composers whose works were neglected in Britain before he became their advocate, such as Delius and Berlioz. Other composers with whose music he was frequently associated were Haydn, Schubert, Sibelius and the composer he revered above all others, Mozart.

I made the transfer from Australian laminated 78 rpm pressings.

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