Gramophone. 1952. Review of the Furtwangler / Flagstad / Suthaus - Tristan und Isolde

[Segilla]

Is there anyone who has access to back numbers? My ancient recollection is that Suthaus didn't get a very good review. Is this true?
Maybe this came out in the quarterly retrospect (by D S-T?).

[jayne lee wilson]

Is there anyone who has access to back numbers? My ancient recollection is that Suthaus didn't get a very good review. Is this true?
Maybe this came out in the quarterly retrospect (by D S-T?).

"I have no hesitation in putting this alongside the Decca Parsifal as one of the superlative achievements of recorded music. And my gratitude to all concerned is unbounded."
Alec Robertson in the Gramophone of March 1953.

His praise for Suthaus was equally enthusiastic, though he does allude to the singer receiving "rather tepid reviews" for his Covent Garden performances. I couldn't find any archived retrospective comments from around the same time, though there have been many, and varied, reviews of the CD issues since, of course.

[Segilla]

Many thanks indeed. Clearly memory has let me down.
In my impressionable teenage years I used to read The Gramophone and the Musical Review** (was it?). Testing memory again I seem to recall that Alec Robertson (a man with a beautiful speaking voice), listened to the work far into the night in his East Anglian home. And Desmond Shawe-Taylor’s later Quarterly Review, writing something like, ‘in the opera house we come tired to the 3rd act of Tristan so that it is better heard on that ideal stage beneath the skull’.

** the journal that regularly carried letters from Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji. Quick to take offence, he regularly fired off pungent letters, with views sometimes expressed in highly inflammatory words. To one unfortunate he responded, ‘Like the cuttlefish when pursued,
Mr – has emitted a cloud of ink, but very little else.