Halleluja: The Portsmouth Sinfonia at the Royal Albert Hall (1974)

Self-described as the world's worst orchestra and often mentioned in the same breath as Florence Foster Jenkins, the Portsmouth Sinfonia was an exercise in musical Dada that ran from 1970 to 1980. Its members were students at the Portsmouth College of Art whose idea was to democratize classical music by taking it away from the "tuxedo Nazis" and putting it in the hands of people with little or no experience on the instrument they were playing. For a few examples, Gavin Bryars played cello, Brian Eno played clarinet, and Michael Nyman played euphonium in the Sinfonia.

The Sinfonia was not so much a camp joke as it was a satire on the commercialized stuffiness of the Royal Philharmonic and the London Symphony Orchestra. Its members attended rehearsals regularly, approached their performances seriously - and accepted wrong notes proudly as just a part of life. When the copyright administrator for Also sprach Zarathustra refused to let the Sinfonia release their performance of the work, complaining that they had made changes to it, their manager offered that "it wasn't intentional, but happened more as a result of incompetence". And when the BBC refused to let them perform in their Promenade Concerts, which were supposed to make classical music accessible to the masses, the Sinfonia rented the Royal Albert Hall themselves and performed to a sold-out audience.

So the Portsmouth Sinfonia's second LP comes to us courtesy of the BBC's stuffiness. It was recorded live on 28 May 1974 and contains seven earnestly performed and almost recognizable works by Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, Schubert, Rossini, and Handel.

These MP3s were made from the LP using NCH Software's Golden Records analogue-to-digital ripper. Its filters for normalization (to render Mr Bond's comments audible) and click/pop reduction (to remove much of the surface noise) were applied.

Portsmouth Sinfonia at Royal Albert Hall
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