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Many music lovers miss the sound from vinyl pressings. Many others have yet to discover how pleasant the sound can be. Most of our albums are mastered from vinyl LP pressings and earlier recordings (before 1953) from 78 rpm discs. It is our ability to recreate, in the digital age, the sound from the disc era that many of our customers find most enjoyable.

Unlike modern digital recordings tracks in our albums do contain some distortion, and the occasional surface noises, but for many listeners these "defects" are soon forgotten.

Our albums are available from many download sites.

We are in the process of moving our recommended download site from iTunes to Qobuz where you can download or stream in higher quality, but at the same price as iTunes.

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The following are reviews by Brian Wilson at Music Web International

"DVOŘÁK Slavonic Dances, Op.46 (B83) recorded by the Czech Philharmonic and Václav Talich in July 1950 - Beulah have done very well by the 1950 – well enough, indeed, for the idiomatic and lively performances to be very enjoyable.

Ansermet’s Mother Goose Suite (mono LXT5426 – the stereo was not released until 1960) was hailed as offering ‘magical performances … splendidly reproduced’ and that remains as good a summing-up as any. I’ve seen Ma Mère l’Oye described as boring: it’s far from it in this performance. With the additional movements, Ansermet’s selection falls little short of the complete ballet. If I have given less space than to the Slavonic Dances, make no mistake: I thoroughly enjoyed both halves of this release. "

"Scholarly opinion now inclines to the belief that if Bach actually composed BWV565 it was as a deliberate decision to employ an older style. No convincing alternative composer has been mooted, however, so Bach it remains at least for the present and the work continues to be as popular as ever. The RFH organ in 1960 had its shortcomings, but they were less apparent in Bach than some other composers: Ralph Downes made a notable series of Bach recordings on it for Pye and Beulah have included his BWV540 on The Art of J.S. Bach (1PD91).

"Gamba used to be known as Pierino: I’m not sure when we started referring to him by his ‘proper’ name, but the familiar form seems more appropriate for the joyful overture collections which he gave us. The mono Cenerentola Overture inevitably sounds thin immediately after the Bach in stereo but the ear soon adjusts and the performance is very enjoyable.

"Jensen’s Nielsen is about as authoritative as it gets. As with the Rossini, the transfer is good enough to allow appreciation of the performance, which won new friends for the work and can stand comparison with any of the more recent offerings

"The oldest recording comes last: Louis Kentner and Thomas Beecham collaborating in an early Mozart piano concerto. It may seem surprising that Kentner was thought in 1940 to lack a little delicacy until we remember that Mozart’s piano writing was customarily treated then like Meissen porcelain and Kentner, an under-rated pianist, adopts a more robust style that would hardly be out of place now. Actually Meissen is tougher than it looks and so is Mozart: if anything I found the orchestral contribution a little too delicate by comparison with more recent recordings. That’s partly due to the fairly thin and somewhat shrill recording; though it has come up sounding well for its age, it’s not quite the miracle that Beulah sometimes achieve with 78s. "

"Kathleen Ferrier’s legendary 1952 recording of three Rückert-Lieder remains available with her even more famous Das Lied von der Erde on Decca Legends but the Beulah release will be preferable for those who, like me, remain impervious to her Lied. I make an exception, however, in the case of these three Rückert songs and the recording – another problem, I suspect, in my appreciation of her voice – has come up surprisingly well in this transfer.

"Ferdinand Grossman made a number of recordings of Mozart masses for Vox, not always with the best of soloists, but in this case he had a distinguished team and even the Vienna Symphony Orchestra – also credited as the Vienna Pro Musica – give of their best. You will, however, find most of the tempi slow. Mozart never finished this work, though it had been promised as a present to his wife Constanze. It’s sometimes recorded with the missing sections filled in from other Mozart masses but Grossman gives us only echt Mozart; look elsewhere if you want a ‘complete’ version. The recording remains a little fuzzy. "

"Beulah have an uncanny knack of reissuing better-sounding transfers of recordings on which I got to know particular works. Van Beinum’s Brahms First is a case in point The performance remains competitive – a safe recommendation – and the recording has come up reasonably well. It wouldn’t be my only choice for a recording of this symphony but I’m pleased to have it as an alternative to the craggy Klemperer or the smoother Karajan . The big Beethoven-like tune in the finale grows organically out of its surroundings, as it should and does in the best recordings.

"With two large-scale works coupled, this is a generously filled album.

"If anything, the Second Piano Concerto recording is even more of a classic than the symphony: as reissued by Testament it was a well-deserved Building a Library first choice in 2001. That CD remains available, with some piano pieces as fillers, but the Beulah release is less expensive and the more generous coupling will probably have greater appeal. Again, it wouldn’t be my only choice, but it makes the Backhaus-Böhm classic from 1967 sound stodgy. Solomon and Dobrowen should make a fine adjunct to any collection Solomon – he usually dispensed with his surname – plays superbly, emphasising the poetic aspects of the music, and he’s very well supported though you may never have heard of Issay Dobrowen (sometimes spelled Dobroven). The recording has been extremely well transferred: apart from some marginal distortion at peaks, as if the VU meters had gone into the red zone, the sound is almost preferable to the Beinum, with but the merest hint of 78 noise, and the balance between piano and orchestra is very good. That’s all the more remarkable an achievement when one reads in the review from 1947 that the tone was considered a touch dry. "

" Hans Gillesberger made the first recording of this ‘Mass in Time of War’ in 1950; it was made in Vienna with the State Opera, sponsored by the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston and released by Parlophone. He re-recorded the work for Vox in 1962, again in Vienna but with different soloists, choir and orchestra, and this is the one which Beulah have included on this download, albeit from a mono release of a recording also made in stereo. The performance is dignified, the soloists good, but the choral and orchestral support no more than adequate at times and the recording not much more than acceptable, with the soloists faring much better than chorus and orchestra. I enjoyed hearing it again but there are far better versions to be had

"The conductor of the popular Trumpet Concerto, Kurt Redel, had himself been the flute soloist in another Haydn concerto and he accompanies an enjoyable performance. This US Angel recording has come up sounding well.

"To return to 1952 mono for the final Exsultate Jubilate is to enter a thinner sound-world. I love Hilde Gueden in the right repertoire, which includes her role in the Kleiber Figaro but there is too much vibrato here, though light by the standards of the time. Her singing is not without awareness of appoggiatura, and technically very impressive on the top notes, but the style is out of place when we are used to the likes of Emma Kirkby . Gueden and Erede omit some of the repeats and take the closing Alleluia very sedately: on paper only slightly slower than Kirkby and Hogwood but sounding more deliberate. "

" I was especially interested to hear this recording of the Bruckner because I don’t remember ever having encountered it. I wasn’t expecting too much from the Steinberg, so I was very pleasantly surprised at the result. You could hardly mistake it for other than a product of its age, with the brass sounding dry, but Beulah have made this vintage Capitol recording, also issued on one LP, well worth hearing. Steinberg adopts some pretty fast tempi, which generally work well, though some of the players very occasionally have trouble keeping up, as if used to something slower or with fewer changes of tempo. I enjoyed the performance and the recording is good enough not to modify that enjoyment, but I should warn readers that another reason why Capitol were able to fit this to a single disc is that there is a considerable cut of 60+ bars in the slow movement, reducing what normally takes around 15:40 to 12:51.

"The Collins performances of the Carmen pieces was appeared on one of the earliest Decca LPs. he recording was very good for its age – even the 78s were hailed as ‘another triumph for ffrr (full frequency range recording)’ – though it sounds just a little dry now. Anthony Collins’ recordings are always interesting and Beulah have made something of a speciality of them over the years, not least his Sibelius. His Bizet is not quite in that class and doesn’t quite have the magic of Beecham but it is very enjoyable and the LPO play for him with gusto. "

" The contents of this release may be even more diverse than the others but it enshrines three classic performances, any one of which would make it worthwhile for me. The Griller Quartet recruited William Primrose for their recording of K515 which originally appeared on the Fontana label. The string tone on the LP releases was always a little wiry but Beulah have tamed that on this transfer of what remains a very fine performance.

"There are very fine recordings of the Liszt at all prices and I wouldn’t put the François-Silvestri partnership in quite the same league as, for example, Richter and Kondrashin. Even when it was released in 1961 HMV seem to have thought it uncompetitive with the very best and issued it on their budget Concert Classics label, but it fully justifies its appearance in this collection. Reviewing the partnership in both concertos in an earlier Beulah incarnation I marginally preferred them in No.2.

"In 2013 I compared the BIS with the Decca Eloquence reissue of the Flagstad – a much better transfer than on the Ace of Diamonds LP which I used to own. The Beulah release also presents this wonderful recording in a better light than I remember; there’s very little difference between it and the Decca. I know that there are those as antipathetic to Flagstad as I (mostly) am to Callas and it’s true that she sounded much better in her heyday but these are treasurable performances; I shall probably play them more often than the rest of the programme. "

"Very diverse contents again but with the very generous playing time you could regard this as a good way to obtain a classic account of the Bruckner, a work still often given an album to itself, and regard the Bach and Handel as bonuses.

"They don’t play Bach like this any more, though they did for a long time after this Weingartner recording. A recording of historical interest, then, rather than a recommendation, though the transfer is amazingly good for its age, with the merest trace of 78 surface noise.

"The Geraint Jones Zadok the Priest, recorded for DG, was stylistically ahead of its time and the performance would hardly be out of place even in our authentically-minded times. The performance is smaller-scale than, say, the classic King’s recording, or at the coronation of George II, but infinitely better sung than in that original ceremony when the music was reportedly in disarray.

"Of course Bruno Walter’s recording of Bruckner’s Ninth was made far too early to have included the fourth movement completion which has featured on some recent recordings. Abbado gives the first and third movements a little more time to breathe than Walter, at tempi closer to those of Otto Klemperer, but there’s no sense in which they sound rushed in the Walter recording, though he perhaps over-stresses the feierlich half of the marking slightly at the expense of the misterioso in the first movement. In the case of Bruckner’s Ninth I could be very happy with Klemperer or this transfer of the Walter. The Beulah transfer of what was always a good recording can’t match the newer Abbado, ultimately my first choice for the three-movement Ninth, but it won’t interfere with your enjoyment of a sensitive performance. "

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