What Anniversary Is The 75th ?

The cover mount cd from the current edition of BBC Music magazine celebrates the 75th anniversary of the founding of the London Philharmonic Orchestra with recordings stretching from 1933 to 2007. I don't have too much to say about what is a nice enough tribute but doesn't particularly hold together as a programmed cd. It's interesting to hear the vintage tracks even if they are relatively brief pieces ( Sir Thomas Beecham, the orchestra's founder, conducting Chabrier's Espana, Elgar conducting his own Elegy For String Orchestra and Sir Adrian Boult conducting Elgar's arrangement of Bach's Fantasia and Fugue in C minor ) The works that take up the bulk of the disk are Mahler's Songs of a Wayfarer from the 1990s with Klaus Tennstedt conducting soloist Thomas Hampson and Tchaikovsky's Serenade For Strings under the current conductor Vladimir Jurowski. These are both live concert performances whereas the vintage tracks are from BBC radio recordings. The various incarnations of the LPO play well throughout and it is interesting to hear Hampson singing the early songs, many of which later found themselves incorporated into Mahler symphonies in different forms.