Sergei Prokofiev
Piano Concerto No. 1-3

Martha Argerich, piano
Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor



Samuel Barber
Orchestral Works and Concertos
Leonard Slatkin, Charles Munch



Rimsky-Korsakov
Evgeny Svetlanov


Beethoven
Symphony No.9
Piano Transcription by Franz Liszt
Konstantin Scherbakov, Piano



Kronos Caravan

I never thought I’d liken Beethoven symphonies to a Clint Eastwood film, but this disc literally has The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.  Like the criminals on the gallows hastily built in the town square somewhere in the American Southwest, we wait for Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name to sharpshoot the rope to let us drop free instead of letting that rope do us in.  But as in the scene where Eli Wallach holds a pistol to Clint’s head, not allowing him to fire the saving shot, and the condemned man dances the jig of death, we are left twisting in the wind as a swaying dead weight on the rope.

First, the Good: This is one of the fieriest Beethoven Fourth Symphonies on the market, combining Toscanini’s drive with finesse.  Orchestral playing doesn’t get more furious than in those dominant-seventh chords which lead from the adagio into the allegro in the first movement; and you’d certainly be hard pressed to find a more elegant dispatch of the fourth movement’s chattering semiquavers. Yet, as its components are admirably balanced, this is also a classical reading: accents are marked, but not over-emphasized; the tempi are flowing, but not too swift; phrasing is affectionate, but never mannered.  Weingartner provides a rapt, singing slow movement—a pleasant surprise—with the introduction, taken twice as fast as usual, imparting a single span to the entire movement.  Considering the date of the recording (1933) the Vienna Philharmonic plays surpassingly well, with less scratchy intonation and more string tone than was their wont then.

Now, the Bad: Weingartner’s Eroica, though good, falls just short of great.  His first movement starts promisingly with very noble phrasing in the low strings. He adumbrates the work’s architecture admirably, but one reaches the end of the movement having remembered nothing. He provides an essentially stoic view of the funeral march, and, while some may warm to his understated, reverent approach, I miss the trenchant weight of Furtwangler or the searing drama of Erich Kleiber.  The scherzo is the most successful movement, sharply conceived and realized, but the finale fails to maintain long-range rhythmic impetus,─a rather piecemeal impression of Beethoven’s complex and protracted structure, with the coda becoming a irrelevant appendage. To be fair, it is difficult to integrate the finale’s sectionalized structure into a seamless whole, but a few great recordings of this piece have done precisely that: Klemperer’s and Erich Kleiber’s.

Finally, the Ugly: Mark Obert Thorn has done an excellent job giving a centered spatial presence to the recording, but he cannot reveal what wasn’t there to begin with. The recording has almost no bass; almost everything below middle C sounds disconcertingly sparse. There is neither depth nor bloom, and an annoying level of tape hiss. None of this will trouble historical performance buffs, but will pose serious problems to those accustomed to pristine digital sound.  It is difficult to enjoy a performance when so much of it cannot be heard well. The case against this recording thickens when one considers that so many other fine mono performances have been captured in more realistic sound, albeit at later dates. This is a disc primarily for Weingartner buffs and completists. Buy it for the excellent fourth symphony, but stick to Kleiber and Furtwangler for the third.

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