Walter Goehr and the London Philharmonic Orchestra – Symphony in C major (Bizet) (1937/8)

Walter Goehr conducts the London Philharmonic Orchestra in an excellent first recording of Bizet’s ‘Symphony in C major,’ recorded in Studio No. 1, Abbey Road, on 26 November 1937 (sides 1, 2 and 4-7) and 4 January 1938 (side 2).

The movements are:

00:00 1st movement – Allegro vivo
08:13 2nd movement – Adagio
17:25 3rd movement – Allegro vivace
21:23 4th movement – Finale: Allegro vivace

From Wikipedia:

The Symphony in C is an early work by the French composer Georges Bizet. According to Grove’s Dictionary, the symphony ‘reveals an extraordinarily accomplished talent for a 17-year-old student, in melodic invention, thematic handling and orchestration.’ Bizet started work on the symphony on 29 October 1855, four days after turning 17, and finished it roughly a month later. It was written while he was studying at the Paris Conservatoire under the composer Charles Gounod, and was evidently a student assignment. Bizet showed no apparent interest in having it performed or published, and the piece was never played in his lifetime…His widow, Geneviève Halévy (1849–1926), gave the manuscript to Reynaldo Hahn, who passed it along with other papers to the archives of the conservatory library, where it was found in 1933 by Jean Chantavoine. Soon thereafter, Bizet’s first British biographer Douglas Charles Parker (1885–1970) showed the manuscript to the conductor Felix Weingartner, who led the first performance in Basel, Switzerland, on 26 February 1935.

The symphony was immediately hailed as a youthful masterpiece on a par with Felix Mendelssohn’s overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, written at about the same age, and quickly became part of the standard Romantic repertoire. It received its first recording in 1937, by the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Walter Goehr

Walter Goehr (28 May 1903 – 4 December 1960) was a German composer and conductor.

Goehr was born in Berlin, where he studied with Arnold Schoenberg and embarked on a conducting career, before being forced as a Jew to seek employment outside Germany after working for Berlin Radio in 1932. He was invited to become music director for the Gramophone Company (later EMI), so he moved to London. In 1937, he conducted the London Philharmonic Orchestra in the premiere recording of Bizet’s Symphony in C. During his years as a staff conductor for EMI, he conducted the orchestra for many recordings… In more popular items, his name appears on the record labels as ‘G. Walter’ or ‘George Walter’…After the war he conducted for several smaller recording companies based in Europe, including for the concerto recordings of the short-lived Australian pianist Noel Mewton-Wood.

As well as teaching composition in Britain he also instructed pupils in conducting…In England he worked for the Columbia Record Company, and between 1945 and 1948 was conductor of the BBC Theatre Orchestra (the predecessor of today’s BBC Concert Orchestra); he was also a skilled arranger…He was one of many musicians of European origin and training recruited by Michael Tippett for the staff of Morley College. Goehr conducted many important premieres at Morley…

His first successful composition was Malpopita in 1931, an opera especially designed for radio broadcast. This work was not scheduled for its first live performance until 6 May 2004, in Berlin, Prenzlauer Berg, Abspannwerk Humboldt.

In 1942, he made a new arrangement of Mussorgsky’s piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition with a subsidiary piano part. In 1946, he arranged a number of Mussorgsky’s piano pieces into the orchestral suite Pictures from the Crimea. In 1946, Goehr composed the music for the much acclaimed film Great Expectations, directed by David Lean. He wrote several other film scores. He was also well known for conducting film soundtracks, including A Canterbury Tale, for which his friend Allan Gray had composed the score.

In 1952 he conducted the first recording of L’Incoronazione di Poppea, conducting the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich in a live stage performance. The LP version, issued in 1954, won a Grand Prix du Disque in 1954.

He also conducted the UK premiere of Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie in 1953.

He died in Sheffield City Hall, England, on 4 December 1960, immediately after conducting a performance of Handel’s Messiah.

Goehr married his wife Laelia, a classically-trained pianist, cabaret artist and photographer, in the early 1930s. She took informal photography lessons with Bill Brandt and set up her own studios in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, where they lived from the start of World War II. Their son, composer and academic Alexander Goehr, was born in 1932.

I transferred this work from Hayes pressings of HMV C 2986/9.

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