Beethoven: Symphonies Nos. 3 "Eroica" & 5

Ludwig van Beethoven (Composer), Arturo Toscanini (Conductor), NBC Symphony Orchestra (Orchestra) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Orchestra: NBC Symphony Orchestra
• Conductor: Arturo Toscanini
• Composer: Ludwig van Beethoven
• Audio CD (March 22, 2005)
• SPARS Code: DDD
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Asv Living Era
• ASIN: B0007KTIHE
• Also Available in: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #812,282 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars STUDIO 8-H AND MR DAVID LENNICK, October 4, 2005

By 

DAVID BRYSON (Glossop Derbyshire England) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Beethoven: Symphonies Nos. 3 "Eroica" & 5 (Audio CD)

NBC under General David Sarnoff gave Toscanini his own orchestra: they also gave him studio 8-H. Among initiates, the place is notorious. Its acoustic is not only boxy and constricted, it's as dry as a bone as well, with no resonance whatsoever. Something I find curious about Toscanini is that while he was a fearsome old tyrant with his players, he seems never to have called into question what his recording technicians served him up. Beecham in his own way was hardly if at all less tyrannical, but the recording people felt his yoke and his lash as well -- it was a complete waste of effort to tell Beecham that he couldn't have the sound-quality he demanded, and the difference in the sound provided to these two contemporary giants among conductors is vast. Here we have Toscanini in the stygian 8-H again in 1939, but this time we have the transfers and production handled by David Lennick.

Mr Lennick's work is known to me from Beecham's Delius recordings over the period 1934-8 (plus a few even earlier). His method is to work from the best available 78's, not from tapes or shellac or anything of the kind, and while not even he can quite make silk purses out of sows' ears he gets a long way towards that. With the first chords of the Eroica I would have known `8-H' right away, but I only had to think back to my vinyl collection of Toscanini such as his Brahms double concerto to appreciate what Mr Lennick has probably achieved even here; and when it comes to the fifth symphony I would not even have realised where we were at all. Even for such a valuable piece of historical restoration as this disc is, I can't see my way to awarding 5 stars, and the listener's imagination has to work hard to reconstruct what these performances presumably sounded like, but enough comes across to make this a disc I wouldn't want to miss.

For the most part Toscanini's tempi are much more normal than one often sees suggested. In this account of the fifth the speeds are fastish I suppose, but nothing out of the ordinary. The repeat is made in the first movement, as it should be in such a short piece, and the andante outstays its welcome from me as usual. In general I didn't detect any of the touches that can make this conductor unmistakable in even the worst recorded sound, but it may be that nothing but modern sound can rescue either that dull slow movement or the truly ridiculous end of the last movement - how much better Beethoven handled that sort of wind-up in Leonora #3 in the same key and written not much later. The Eroica is another matter entirely. Apart from its wonderful opening movement it has never been one of my favourite Beethoven works. It was my first ever LP in Klemperer's performance 50 years ago, whether because I had read a favourable review or whether because I had seen the title misprinted as `erotica'. This Toscanini recording has actually done something to change my view of the work. I had always been able to admire the funeral march, but it had always previously left me cold - with the exception of the Dead March in Saul I find such compositions tolerable only to the corpse. This time Mr Lennick has raised the sound to the standard where I was genuinely gripped by the piece, grand and processional at Toscanini's superbly judged tempo. Toscanini also does what the scherzo seems to me to require, viz he takes it as fast as possible. In the great first movement I think I can sense a great performance again, with what I suspect was probably some impressive horn playing, (as in the trio of the scherzo also), and the speed not excessively fast, indeed fairly normal.

Historical reissues like this are rarely or never safe recommendations, but `safety first' is hardly a motto I would think appropriate for Beethoven. I would not have wanted to miss this issue, and perhaps I have managed to indicate to some extent what seems to me to mark it out.