"Anthony Vincent Benedictus Collins (3 September 1893 – 11 December 1963) was a British composer and conductor. He scored around 30 films in the US and the UK between 1937 and 1954, and composed the British light music classic Vanity Fair in 1952. His Decca recordings of the seven Sibelius symphonies was the second cycle by a single conductor and orchestra released." - Wikipedia

Anthony Collins recorded the first complete Sibelius Symphony cycle outside Scandinavia with the London Symphony Orchestra for Decca between 1952 and 1955 – these recordings were restored and XR remastered for release by Pristine in 2022 (PASC 671, 675, 677), and have only gained in stature and renown since their original LP issues.

Overlapping these recordings Collins also recorded a number of shorter works by the composer, initially for Decca with the London Symphony and, in 1957, for HMV with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. As with the Decca recordings, these later HMV discs were also mono-only, the label being generally somewhat later to adopt stereo recording than much of the competition.

It has proved impossible to fit all of these recordings onto a single disc, hence I’ve made a selection of works from both the Decca and the HMV releases, and brought Pristine’s Ambient Stereo remastering to both to what I hope you’ll agree is great effect.

If questions were raised by some contemporary critics with respect to Collins’ interpretations of the symphonies, his recordings of these shorter works were very well received at the time:

“The disc makes a good investment for the new Sibelius collector who doesn’t, for one reason or another, want the symphonies. It also makes a convenient appendage to Anthony Collins’s other Sibelius records; he’s done the Karelia overture but not the subsequent suite. This isn’t as you might expect incidental music to a play, but a musical souvenir of a particular part of Finland where the people are remarkable by Finnish standards for their vivacity and friendliness. The Intermezzo, which might be likened to a forest procession of riders approaching gradually through the overhanging leaves, and the Alla Marcia with its two bonhomous times, are both well known and often played. The intervening Ballad doesn’t seem to have been recorded before; it’s a long, gaunt composition, which extends and gradually elaborates a very Sibelian (but surely not Karelian?) melody; the ballad is scored mostly for strings. Collins builds up the climaxes well in the outer pieces, and conveys the impressiveness of the ballad; the rhythm of the march is not quite as lively as one might wish.

The other pieces are all otherwise available. Collins’s version of the famous Swan, gliding in majesty round the Scandinavian Styx, is finely done, with admirable recorded presence; the percussion and the string patterns emerge with wonderful clarity, and Leonard Brain plays his celebrated solo with real artistry.” (The Gramophone, August 1958)

The movements from the Pelléas et Mélisande Suite were originally issued across two releases, with the second, seventh eighth and ninth appearing as filler to the Symphony No. 6 in late 1955, whilst the other movement recorded by Collins, the sixth, Pastorale, would appear a few months later on a ten-inch Decca LP to accompany the Karelia Overture referred to in the review above, as well as the other movements that had already appeared on the symphony disc.

In today’s world of multiple exhaustive recordings of most major composers’ complete works, available freely at the touch of a button or click of a mouse, it’s worth remembering a time when real dedication was needed just to hear some of these works and build an even vaguely comprehensive collection – not to mention the dilemma of whether, after spending the present-day equivalent of £61.20 (about $78 US) on the Symphony LP you could afford to spend a further equivalent of £32.75 ($41.75) just to add two and a quarter minutes of extra Pelléas et Mélisande music and seven minutes of the Karelia Overture to your collection. Decisions not taken lightly!

Anthony Collins’s pioneering integral Sibelius symphony cycle from 1952–55 (beaten to the finish line only by Sixten Ehrling’s 1952–53 set with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra) was for a long time a much-admired traversal. But not so here at Fanfare, where both resident Sibelius doyen Richard A. Kaplan (in his magisterial “Sibeliusaurus” essay from 30:3, and subsequent reviews of Decca Eloquence issues in 31:6 and 45:4) and more recently Huntley Dent (also of the Eloquence set of Collins’s complete studio recordings, in 45:4) have been rather dismissive of it. (Arthur S. Leonard and Paul Ingram offered far more positive views in 1:2 and 31:6.) Kaplan finds the cycle to be “overrated” and Collins to be “a workaday conductor, many of whose Sibelius recordings sound rushed, inflexible, even frenetic.” Dent likewise terms Collins “an also-ran … a proficient studio maestro who showed up, did the required work with diligence, and returned home to his dinner. His manner … was objective and efficient” with an “emphasis on energy and momentum … an air of ‘get on with it’.” However, “Anyone searching for a striking podium personality or inspiration will be hard pressed to find them.” Kaplan and Dent agree in finding the Collins performances to be lacking in “mystery,” with the latter adding, “For me this flaw discounts all of Collins’s Sibelius.” (Both also suggest that the cycle’s undeserved esteem was due to insular British boosterism.) As some readers have doubtless already inferred, I am here to offer a dissenting opinion. What is fascinating is that I clearly am hearing many of the same phenomena as my two colleagues, but would describe them in very different terms.

First, we are agreed that Collins’s performances are brisk and energetic; Kaplan notes for example that the performance of the Third Symphony is the fastest among 34 recordings he surveyed, and the First the second fastest out of 44 versions. But unlike him I do not find the performances inflexible or overly rushed, but rather exhilarating and impetuous. For me, too many Sibelius conductors tend to drag and bloat these scores (Kaplan rightly chastises Barbirolli on this count), as if they are from the pens of Mahler, Bruckner, or Russian Romantics such as Tchaikovsky, whereas Sibelius had a far more Classical aesthetic. This admirably suited Collins and his several virtues as a conductor: a fine ear for orchestral balances and instrumental colors, extremely clear delineation of distinct instrumental lines, taut rhythms, crisp articulation, pointed accents, effective shaping of swells and ebbs in dynamics, and innate sense of interpretive style. Such qualities should never be taken for granted, or deemed mere matters of technique rather than facets of a conductor’s interpretive arsenal. Dent rightly notes an essential aesthetic kinship between Collins and Adrian Boult; unlike him, however, I find no lack of personality or inspiration in such an approach, even though my own tastes normally tilt toward Romantics such as Bruno Walter and Furtwängler. And, if the ensemble playing is occasionally rough (though it is mostly quite good), it is no more so than in many other recordings from the era, even ones made by the Concertgebouw or the Berlin or Vienna Philharmonics, at a time when orchestral standards of execution were for the most part significantly less polished than they are today.

Second, I also agree that mystery is largely absent from Collins’s approach to Sibelius. If, like Dent, you deem mystery to be an essential, irreducible component of the Finnish master’s music, then like him you will find this cycle sorely lacking. That said, I think two countervailing considerations are in order. One is that it depends on what one means, or is looking for, in speaking of mystery here. The symphonies of Sibelius are not those of Bruckner, let alone Wagner’s Parsifal. Such mystery as one may find in Sibelius is immanent, not transcendent; that of Nordic woodlands and sprites, not of the incarnation or transubstantiation in Christian theology. The other point is that the fundamental Classicism of Sibelius—recall his pointed statement to Mahler of his admiration for strictness of symphonic forms and logic of thematic relations, and his famous description of his own Fourth Symphony as offering “cold spring water” in contrast to “cocktails” concocted by others—means that he intended his symphonies to be understood primarily in formal, not “mystical,” terms. While I quite agree that mystery may be sought and found in these scores, I also think that they may be approached with equal validity in non-mystical terms, and that Collins does so with great success. His Sibelius is unusually optimistic and spirited; I’ve never heard the finale of the Fourth sound so positively upbeat elsewhere as it does here (which is admittedly counter-intuitive). If asked about such an approach to Sibelius in the abstract, I would have been skeptical; but the proof is in the hearing, and for me this works completely.

Third, there is the matter of competing remasterings. Kaplan reviewed the first of these three discs in the previous issue (46:4) and stated, “Pristine’s dynamic range is more narrow than Decca’s, and Decca has better high-frequency definition. The First Symphony is pitched slightly sharp in Pristine’s transfer. I found Pristine’s ‘ambient stereo’ effect unobjectionable, although I prefer Decca’s honest mono.” Kaplan also noted that the CD he received would not play on some of his machines. I contacted Andrew Rose to ask him about these points, and he responded as follows. 1) He never compresses the dynamic range. (I would note that the Pristine issue is remastered at an overall lower volume level; I just turned up the volume knob a couple of notches.) 2) As part of restoring older recordings, using computer analysis, he first seeks to re-equalize them with close reference to more modern, well-made recordings of the same repertoire in order to overcome tonal defects in the historic originals, before making more subjective adjustments. 3) Decca’s recording of the Symphony No. 1 in 1952 suffers throughout from long-term pitch instability due to problems with recording equipment from the era, and overall is slightly flat (A=434), whereas the other symphonies were recorded in 1953–55 at standard pitch (A=440), so Rose corrected the pitch of the First accordingly. 4) A few defective discs unknowingly were pressed when 15-ton street repaving machines working outside of Rose’s house caused vibrations that jarred his CD burners, and he has replaced such items upon notification.

Regarding the second point, I will add that in my opinion Rose has very successfully eliminated a shrill edge in the treble—a frequent problem in Decca’s early 1950s recordings, and one verging at points on distortion and shattering. Two sample passages that make this clear are the first four minutes of the finale of the First Symphony, and the transition between the two main sections of the opening movement of the Fifth Symphony beginning at about the 6:30 mark. In the first of these, Rose has taken a thin harshness away from the violins and given them a fuller, more silken and natural sound; in the second, a raucous overload in the trumpets that I found positively painful has been entirely tamed to sound quite normal. Rose has also added a very slight degree of ambience that makes the sound throughout a bit warmer and richer; however, this also increases residual tape hiss to more audible levels, in contrast to the almost whisper-quiet Decca background. On balance, I prefer the Pristine remasterings for eliminating high-frequency harshness and distortion, but your tastes may differ. (Ironically, a side effect of Pristine’s approach is to make the performances seem just a tad less hectic.)

Fourth, there is a textual matter to consider. As always, Kaplan’s reviews should be read for his detailed commentary on such points: I also wish to thank him for additional information he generously provided by email. As he has noted briefly before, and I will elaborate on here, the finale of the Third Symphony in this recording has an oddly defective passage early on. A repeated passage of four bars (either bars 28–31 or more likely its reiteration in bars 32–35) is missing (the single iteration occupies 0:34 to 0:41 in the movement’s track). As Collins makes no other cuts in the score, this may be an editing error by the original engineers; it would be easy enough to fix today via a splice with computer software, but no-one has seen fit to do so. More oddly, though, the scurrying interspersed divisi violin figures in bars 25–35 are not played. That omission must have been Collins’s doing, since the violins do play the figure when it recurs shortly thereafter, and that makes me suspect that the four-bar cut also was his handiwork. This blemish may rule out at least that symphony, or even the entire cycle, from further consideration for some people; I sigh regretfully, but accept it as an isolated idiosyncrasy. (In his “Sibeliusaurus” mega-overview Kaplan notes several momentary problem spots in published scores under the sub-header “Points of Contention” and recordings that perpetrate those errors.)

On a side note, Rose advised me that he plans a future issue of a fourth CD with Collins’s recordings of several shorter Sibelius pieces. (Per Kaplan’s review, the original Eloquence issues in two two-CD sets omitted a movement of the Pelleas et Melisande incidental music that was subsequently included in the 14-CD set of all of Collins’s recordings, and the First Symphony was afflicted with a peculiar background buzzing noise that the later reissue also fixed.)

Finally, I will give my two pence’ worth on Collins’s interpretations of the symphonies. As mentioned above, they are uniformly fleet and energetic, assertive and muscular, extroverted in outlook. Drama is achieved by strong contrasts in dynamics and of instrumental colors. The protagonist, so to speak, of all the symphonies is a man of action rather than of reflection, a hunter rather than a gatherer. Lyricism is present, but as part of swiftly flowing currents rather than offering eddies of repose. I find his approach to be extremely effective in the first five symphonies, but a degree less so in the last two, which are good but not great renditions, perhaps because these two symphonies have the greatest degree of “mystery” in them. The Fifth and Sixth Symphonies are my two favorites of the seven, and I am particularly fussy about them. For the Fifth, Collins comes close to matching my desert-island choice, Ormandy’s second version from 1975 for RCA. As in the First through the Fourth Symphonies, Collins has a real sense of bold adventure and challenge in this score. For the Sixth I have listened to virtually every recording of it ever made, and I find only two to be fully satisfactory: Ehrling and Oramo (the latter being virtually a clone of the former). Collins is one of the better also-rans, but like so many others he does not get this work’s many tricky tempo relations quite right. His Seventh is creditable, but he lacks the iron grip on the score of Koussevitzky and Ormandy, and fails to plumb its full depths. But while Collins does not rank overall as a podium immortal, I do not find him in these scores to lack either a striking podium personality or inspiration.

In closing, then, whether or not you would wish to acquire this cycle hinges upon several factors: your tastes in conductors, your view of a mystical dimension in Sibelius’s music, your preferences in remastering techniques, and your tolerance for a particular textual deviation. My colleagues Richard Kaplan and Huntley Dent have urged you to give this a pass. For my part, I have it on my shelves alongside Vladimir Ashkenazy, Sixten Ehrling, Sakari Oramo, and (two incomplete runs) Eugene Ormandy and Serge Koussevitzky (mostly live performances in compromised sound) as one of my six Sibelius symphony cycles of choice. From this quarter, then, most enthusiastically recommended.

And, as a postscript, Huntley Dent generously bestowed upon me the Eloquence set of Collins’s complete recordings for Decca, which set Dent reviewed in 45:4. Whereas Dent found it to be a mixed bag, for me virtually every recording in it ranks as good to excellent, and it too receives my warmest commendation. If Anthony Collins was not a truly great conductor, he was an unexpectedly very good one.