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Lots of the great artists here aren't at their best. Emil Gilels gives a perplexingly starchy performance of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 27, Mahler's Symphony No. 4 arrives in a remarkably conservative reading by Rafael Kubelik, and Maurizio Pollini's collaborations with Karl Böhm in Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 and Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4 are both chilly, you-either-love-them-or-hate-them experiences (I favor the latter). Though it's easy to think it's your fault that Hans Werner Henze's Fifth and Sixth Symphonies seem noisy and impenetrable, the booklet quotes the composer as admitting defeat in the latter work. Of course, there's some good stuff here, such as the Carlos Kleiber-conducted
La Traviata with Placido Domingo's voice in the voluptuous bloom of youth, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli's meticulously sculpted Debussy
Images and some
Preludes, two discs of
Ring cycle chunks from Herbert von Karajan, Martha Argerich playing Chopin's Preludes and Piano Concerto No. 2, and some full-throated Bach Christmas cantatas conducted by Karl Richter, though many collectors will already have those.
--David Patrick Stearns
