Sir Thomas "One-way" Beecham

I suppose it is rather petty of me, but I just have to share with you a little clip I ran across over at Norman Lebrecht's blog of the great English conductor, Sir Thomas Beecham.

Perhaps this is just my own personal bias, but I find everything about this little clip quite disgusting. There is something about the English that can really rub me the wrong way and the irony of this seemingly pompous bigot chiding someone else for being a pompous bigot is just classic! I recall Julian Bream commenting once about performing the Aranjuez with Beecham that he was very nasty and uncompromising with the tempo.

Equally annoying is the suspicion that Sir Thomas Beecham may be absolutely correct about how to rehearse an orchestra!

Here he is conducting the third movement of the Symphony No. 38 of Mozart in Montréal in 1956: