Your chief motivation for purchasing this reissue will most likely be the chance to get Pierre Monteux’s 1964 complete Mother Goose. It’s still an extremely likeable performance: “Laideronette” is shapely, but Monteux makes her sound appealingly child-like, too, and as always with Monteux this account is elegantly fluid. Obviously Monteux enjoyed a good working relationship with the LSO, whose woodwinds (especially clarinets and bassoons) compliantly adjust their timbre to produce the shimmering sonorities needed for this work. The first flute’s reedy-sounding solos are nicely done, and the strings have sufficient depth and weight in the concluding Apothéose.
Most of the remaining works here were included on a Philips Universo Series LP. Unless it’s the Monteux style that interests you especially, you’d actually do better to obtain Bernard Haitink’s Philips Duo set with the Concertgebouw, which includes these works in recordings vastly superior to the sometimes abrasive-sounding LSO performances (the endings of La Valse and Boléro are congested, even in the new Philips 50 transfers). It’s hard to know why Philips left Haitink’s outstanding accounts out of its top 50, but you can’t have everything, and they are, of course, already widely available.
