A while back, David Gideon at reDiscovery posted a paperback issue featuring the English conductor Hugo Rignold in Rimsky-Korsakov's Suite from The Golden Cockeral and Mussorgsky's Night on a Bald Mountain in the R-K orchestration. Both performances struck me as quite good and rather idiomatic. So with those fresh in mind, I set out to locate a few more examples of Hugo Rignold's art.
Here we have a Somerset recording of Dukas' Sorcerer's Apprentice and Ravel's Bolero and, an Alshire LP with Dvorak's New World Symphony. All performances feature the London Philharmonic and they date from around 1960.
Of the three compositions, Sorcerer's is the strongest performance with exemplary playing and an insightful interpretation that really goes all out to tell the story in music. Bolero is good, though others have done a far stronger job of building the tension through dynamics and phrasing. This piece REALLY needs significant rehearsal in order to maximize its effect. The New World Symphony practically plays itself although Rignold exhibits a strong sensibility for Dvorak's musical language by stressing the "folk" elements of the score. This recording does possess the tell tale signs of a "rush job," most notably in some intonation problems with the horns. That aside, there is an excitement level present and an overall firm grasp of the symphony is readily apparent.
It would appear that Rignold had a brief recording career, for whatever reason I don't know. From the evidence of these recordings, and those available through reDiscovery, it seems a bit of a pity that Hugo Rignold is all but forgotten today.
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