The British conductor Reginald Goodall is rightly known and celebrated for his operatic conducting. A quick glance at the review archives at Fanfare magazine indicates no less than 28 reviews, all of them for operas, of which more than half were written by Wagner.
This week's release therefore will come as something of a pleasant surprise. For here we have Reginald Goodall conducting orchestral music with the Royal Opera House Orchestra, Covent Garden - and not all of it standard repertoire for anyone, let alone Goodall - all in fine sound from the conductor's own tape reel.
This concert, recorded and then broadcast three days later by the BBC in 1961, opens with music by Dukas - the overture Polyeucte - who has previously only featured on a single one of Pristine's 955 album releases. It's followed by Messiaen's L'Ascension, and the composer thus makes his Pristine debut. Finally we have Schumann's Fourth Symphony, a work which is of course to be found in a number of incarnations in our catalogue.