THE GRAMOPHONE (1927):
It is not a reproduction but the thing itself. Perfect in every detail… the singing… touches and maintains the high level associated with (the singer’s) art at its best. Yet I would fain reserve my warmest tribute for a quarter where I am as a rule least able to bestow it – I mean the orchestra. Mr. Goossens must have taken enormous pains to secure such a clear, vivid and crisp yet refined rendering of Leoncavallo’s clever instrumentation. Exquisitely balanced and always sufficiently audible, it imparts the requisite solidity of tonal foundation to the whole performance.
Hermann Klein

OPERA NOW:
The British National Opera Company was a brave venture se up in 1922. It was also an ambitious company, giving performances of The Ring, Parsifal, Tristan and Pelleas , as well as several British works. It went into voluntary liquidation at the end of the 1920s, surviving for a few years under the auspices of the Royal Opera House as the Covent Garden English Opera Company. These recordings, made in 1927, testify to good solid standards that must have given great pleasure to opera-goers during its existence. A number of distinguished singers of the day took part, and even after nearly eighty years their efforts impress. Among the most notable are the great lyric tenor Heddle Nash (Turiddu), the fine heroic tenor Frank Mullings (Canio), the sweet-toned Miriam Licette (Nedda), bluff Harold Williams (Alfio and Tonio) and rich-toned Dennis Noble (Silvio). The translations sound dated nowadays, but the choral and orchestral forces are strong and the conducting by Aylmer Buesst (Cav)and Eugene Goossens (Pag) notably successful. Good transfers and informative notes.
George Hall

OPERA MAGAZINE:
Opera in English existed years before the current Chandos/Peter Moores venture. Indeed in the 1920s, just before and after the inauguration of electrical recording in 1925, there were a plethora of issues by British artists, many of them souvenirs of their performances on stage with the British National Opera Company, formed in 1922, closed down for lack of funds in 1929. It toured all over the country and made a couple of appearances at Covent Garden. In 1927 Columbia decided to record the BNOC in these virtually complete and pioneering sets of Cav and Pag.

They were issued in rather dowdy, black albums of ten-inch, rather than twelve-inch 78s (actually 80s as that was then Columbia’s prevailing speeds). I still have the originals, but have seldom played them of late because of the surface crackle and the overloading at climaxes. Now, miraculously, like a picture cleaned, Divine Art has put us in its debt by refurbishing them in sound more than respectable for its day with only one or two incidents of distortion remaining, and at mid-price. Whatever you may think of the results, they record, in the other sense, the operatic style prevalent at the time, with the singers taking roles they had assumed with BNOC on stage. As such they have a historical and musical importance.

Alymer Buesst was a founder member of BNOC. Eugene Goossens Snr., father of the next, more famous generations of Goossens, occasionally conducted the company. Both show a true feeling for the works in hand, though the exigencies of the ten-inch format mean some hurried tempi. The orchestra, occasionally sloppy in Cav, plays with disciplined vigour for Goossens.

Main interest in the Mascagni is to hear the young (33-year-old) Heddle Nash as Turiddu two years before his Covent Garden debut. He displays all the innate, immediate passion and plangent tone that was to be so much admired in his performances over the next decade or so, and which confined the Edwardian stuffiness of his English predecessors to the archives. His ‘Mother, that wine burns like fire’ has the true verismo frisson. May Blyth (no relation) may have a voice lighter than we usually hear as Santuzza, but she conveys all the wronged woman’s desperation: she and Nash work themselves into a suitable lather in their duet. In her brief contribution as Lola, Marjorie Parry (Barbirolli’s first wife) is properly seductive. Harold Williams, the stalwart Australian baritone, displays some but not all of Alfio’s bitterness.

He’s heard to greater advantage in the Prologue of Pag, where he offers a smooth, burnished tone and true legato, a feature of all these singers’ performances, though he is a bit tame in the opera proper as Tonio. Nash returns as a stylish Peppe (Leoncavallo’s original spelling): Harlequin’s Serenade is charmingly accented. As Nedda, Miriam Licette,a Marchesi pupil, who often appeared with Beecham at Covent Garden, sings with the pure, firm, unvarnished tone of an earlier age. Dennis Noble, the Thomas Allen of his day, sings a suave, finely articulated Silvio. Frank Mullings, also BNOC’s Otello and Tristan, has always been an acquired taste. His open, untutored tenor is not easy on the ear, but Neville Cardus commented of his Canio in the theatre: ‘His singing is not exactly honey, but how intensely he lived the part!’ And that is the impression he leaves here, in an almost Vickers-like way.

Singers of opera in the vernacular today could learn a lot from the pristine diction heard here. Of course that underlines the period nature of the translations by Frederick Weatherly (who wrote the song ‘Roses of Picardy’). Lines such as ‘Maybe he lives by yonder smithy’ and ‘See the merry wine is winking’ may cause a smile, but that is what was acceptable then, and is part of this fascinating experience of opera in a bygone age.
Alan Blyth

MUSICAL OPINION:
These original sound recordings were made in 1927 and remastered in 2005. May Blyth sings Santuzza, Marjorie Parry sings Lola and the great Heddle Nash is Turiddu in Cav and Miriam Licette sings Nedda with Frank Mullings as Canio, Harold Williams as Tonio, Heddle Nash as Peppe and Dennis Noble as Silvio in Pag . Giving us some historical names of the early British opera singers together with such singers as Heddle Nash and Dennis Noble who came to the fore between the wars and have now become history.

These performances represent the birth of opera as we know it and while the sound takes a little getting used to I can confirm that after a few minutes the quality of the voices and the vitality of the conductors, especially the fine Eugene Goossens, make their mark. Another triumph for Divine art and a perfect gift fro young singers.
Denby Richards

CLASSIC RECORD COLLECTOR:
Opera in English from the Scala? Well, not that one, but the London theatre of the same name. These sets, issued on ten-inch discs in September 1927 and December 1928, show the fine standard reached by the BNOC, that Quixotic venture which brought opera to the British people in the 1920s. The great bass Robert Radford virtually killed himself trying to keep it going, but it was murdered by a very shortsighted, philistine government (not much has changed since). Divine Art are to be congratulated for their enterprise in bringing these sets back to us, but not for their discographical research. They credit Cav entirely to the Australian conductor Aylmer Buesst (whose wife May Blyth sang Santuzza), but four matrices – Turiddu’s Siciliana, Alfio’s entrance song, Santuzza’s aria and the start of the duet between Turiddu and Santuzza – have much later numbers and were conducted (like the whole of Pag ) by Eugène Goossens II. Turiddu’s final aria comes from an intermediate session under Buesst. The need to remake these sides presumably accounted for the much later release of Cav .

That apart, the modern production team have done their work well. The sound is about as good as we are likely to get and the booklet contains the English librettos, as well as useful background on the performers. They include some of the finest singers on the British stage at the time. To have the great Harold Williams in both main baritone roles is real luxury; he does not disappoint. To have Dennis Noble as Silvio in Pag is almost as good. As for Heddle Nash, he manages the totally different demands of second tenor in Pag and lead tenor in Cav with equal ease. Of the main ladies, Miriam Licette will be familiar to many CRC readers – and very fine she is, with a lovely clear tone. May Blyth’s name has not survived so well but I was impressed by her Santuzza, having heard only odd sides of the Cav set in the past. The controversial singer here is Frank Mullings. He was a great favourite with Neville Cardus and other critics of the era but was often slated by vocal connoisseurs for his strange production. His sound is rather strangulated and he seems to be make very little noise for he effort he is obviously putting in. One can tell that he is something of an artist but without being able to see him, one probably misses most of the point of him. He does at least “inhabit” his role but he is no Pertile.

The conducting is impressive and the choral and orchestral work is up to the level of the 1920s in London, not a great time and place for either discipline but very adequate. The English words are sometimes quaint and Beppe becomes Peppe for some reason, but I am waiting for a quiet Sunday morning so that I can play it all again.
Tully Potter

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH:
Historic treasures for opera buffs here in the digital remastering of these 1927 recordings of opera’s most famous double-bill in performances by the shortlived BNOC, successor in 1920 to the Beecham company. Sound is remarkably good, as is the orchestral playing, and it is a thrill to hear singers whose names are part of English operatic history. In Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana , sprucely conducted by Aylmer Buesst, May Blyth is an appealing Santuzza, with Marjorie Parry a delightful Lola, the unmistakeable tenor Heddle Nash as Turiddu, and the Australian bass Harold Williams, remembered from many a Messiah , as Alfio. Young singers today should pay attention to their diction.

In Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci , conducted by Eugene Goossens, Nash and Williams are heard again, this time as Peppe and Tonio. The baritone Dennis Noble is Silvio, and the Italian-trained Miriam Licette sings a dramatic Nedda. Canio is the famous tenor Frank Mullings, whose Otello was said to terrify his Desdemonas by the force of his acting. His vocal style has dated more that that of his colleagues and does not take kindly to the recording studio, but there are moments when one can hear what all the fuss was about.
Michael Kennedy

THE GRAMOPHONE (2006):
The old black Columbia albums were not a pretty sight, and those for 10-inch 78s had a particularly dispiriting look about them. The records themselves were heard as through a fry-up dimly, and often deteriorated towards the centre. One could therefore be ‘put off’ Cavalleria Rusticana in English, even though it offered the excellent Heddle Nash as Turiddu. As for Pagliacci (also in English),that had the added disincentive of Frank Mullings, a tenor whose reputation among he critics in his times was as awesome as his recorded voice was (some would say) awful. Now out of these unpromising materials come some rather startlingly good transfers.

As Andrew Rose, the man responsible, points out, there was a period when Columbia records were known for their “silent surfaces”, and happily he has had access to early copies of the originals from this period. The clarity and immediacy of sound reveal performances which at best give pleasure by any standards and, at less than that, are fascinating as period documents.

In Cav the violin-playing does credit to nobody, yet this loose, slithery style must then have been acceptable, even “authentic”. In Pag the male chorus sings with unabashed gusto in tones that (inaccurately no doubt) we tend to call ‘beery’. Then the pronunciation is very much of its period, every “r” rolled (as in “charrm”, and the “l” sounds (Nash was a great one for this) shaded to “Ae”. The translations represent the kind of thing the current “Opera in English” series on Chandos is keen to avoid: my favourite is Nedda’s beautifully enunciated “For such a passion / The whip is the fashion”. But there’s fine singing, and not only from Nash. Harold Williams, a little shy of the high notes, is splendidly firm and resonant in both operas. Miriam Licette is a very un-Italian Nedda but her “take” of the high notes is distinctly that of a Marchesi pupil. Similarly, May Blyth is a lightweight Santuzza but still provides much to admire. Of Mullings’s Canio, the throatiness and discomfort in the upper range are to some extent offset by a warmly personal timbre and intense dramatic commitment.

MUSICWEB:
Following hard on the heels of their very welcome Elijah, also reviewed by me, comes Divine Art’s restoration of the 1927 British National Opera Company recordings of "Cav and Pag" sung naturally enough in English in the occasionally wincing words of Frederic E Weatherly. The BNOC rose from the ashes of Beecham’s Opera Company, which had collapsed in 1920. It fulfilled an important role in British operatic life during the relatively short time it survived bringing opera to the provinces and giving a good launch-pad for a number of important singers and conductors. It also attracted some eminent figures to perform in its ranks – Melba, Teyte, Hislop and Edward Johnson among them.

Recorded complete in 1927 with a first class cast, this is a most worthwhile resurrection though its appeal will be specialist. Genuine Italianate voices are, with the exception of Nash, in short supply and the ethos is, inevitably given the drawing room tendencies of the libretto, very English indeed. Though the orchestra has been praised in Cavalleria rusticana I have to say that the strings sound very thin and few and employ a continuous portamento that is unusually obtrusive and pervasive even for the time. The anonymous London orchestra for the 1930 Elijah was immeasurably superior. That said some of the woodwind playing is characterful and impressive and the conductor, the Australian Aylmer Buesst keeps things cracking on.

Nash is ardent, Schipa-like in his beauty of tone, though even he, a master of perfect diction and with a strong Italian training, is confounded by the translation in the Siciliana. There’s a credible and creditable choral balance. May Blyth is a successful Santuzza, with an attractive command if just a touch pinched at the top. Marjorie Parry, Barbirolli’s first wife, is an immediately attractive though light-ish mezzo and manages to bring a certain element of flightiness to her role. The great Elijah Harold Williams is on hand as Alfio. His diction was probably second only to Nash’s amongst the cast members but he was less of a stage animal. His forte was oratorio and also ballads and he can sound rather wooden here - which is a pity especially as he doesn’t seem in his best voice (he’s better in Pag and better still in 1927’s Beecham Messiah – Williams was very busy in the recording studios that year). The little known Justine Griffiths fares well as Lucia; she’s rare on record and little biographical information has seemingly survived. Above all however it’s Nash who rises to the top by virtue of his virility, his elegant and passionate declamation and his sheer beauty of tone. His peak is, in English, Mother, that wine burns me.

As with the companion opera the full English text is printed but there are some blips with the tracking (for example No.7), which is not properly synchronized with the text.

I Pagliacci saw Eugene Goossens II (also known as Senior to distinguish him from the rest of the Goossens dynasty) assuming the conductorial role. He has the same small body of slithery strings at his disposal and the same characterful winds. Williams is in better voice as Tonio but the focus falls inevitably on the histrionic figure of the Frank Mullings. He was by all accounts a great actor-singer and Beecham for one was almost in awe of him, an almost unparalleled position for the singer-disdaining Baronet. The records however leave a very mixed impression; certainly of great personality and penetration, but the voice itself is utilitarian and indeed decidedly un-beautiful. In his notes Andrew Rose tries to mount a defence of Mullings by claiming that his records "more than most" suffer from being transferred at the wrong speed – but this surely affects anyone from that period and the evidence of his recordings is that the voice was not an instrument of any appreciable beauty at all. The vocal production as such is frankly is all over the place even if his self-belief is palpable, the stage magnetism implied, though to be taken on trust.

Miriam Licette, a singer I greatly admire, is an excellent but very English Nedda. Nash appears once more as Peppe but there’s much less for him to do and, for once, he seems to lack his usual tonal allure. It’s really only in the upper register that he becomes the characteristic Nash – in his exchanges with Licette’s Columbine – and displays something of his tenore di grazia. The young Dennis Noble makes a good showing as Silvio.

AMAZON.COM & NEW ENGLAND REGIONAL PRESS:
More often than not, recordings of Leoncavallo’s “I Pagliacci” and Mascagni’s ”Cavalleria Rusticana” are packaged together. They were both written at the same time (Some say for the same contest), both are very short with an intermezzo between the two parts, both end with a line of spoken dialogue, and both involve someone being killed because of an adulterous affair. To this I might add that they are among the last few operas that have lovely and memorable melodies, a feature ignored by those who thought that Wagner was the only way to go.

Before the invention of the jet, many if not most operas were performed in Europe in the language of the host country. One of the earliest recordings of “Carmen” was in German and another in Italian, So it should be no surprise that in 1927, two recordings of “Cav and Pag” were issued, featuring performances in English by the British National Opera Company, the first conducted by Aylmer Buesst and the second by Eugene Goossens. I was delighted to find that Divine Art has re-issued then on a 2-CD boxed set and hearing them was quite a time-tripping experience.

The tenor in “Cavalleria” (Heddle Nash) lacks the inner passion needed to convince; and the tenor in “Pagliacci” (Frank Mullings) is simply bad *. But lovers of off-beat recordings of opera and surely collectors of historically important recordings (such as myself) will not want to pass this set up.”
Frank Behrens

[* note from divine art: as we record in the sleeve notes, Frank Mullings’ voice was incredibly powerful, ideal for the stage, and the recording engineers had immense trouble “taming” the voice for the primitive microphones of the day. So we would say his recorded performance was not “bad” but “robust”.  Respected music critic Gerald Fenech says: "I have heard the recordings and absolutely cannot agree with the statement that the tenor in “Pagliacci” (Frank Mullings) is simply bad". The set is magnificently refurbished and sounds great."