Customer Reviews

Felix Weingartner Conducts Brahms' 4 Symphonies

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

The sound on these tranfers is full and clear, rather better than what one might expect on other labels such as Naxos, which tends to be over-bright and thin in the bass. My memories of the 78 rpm set of the Fourth Symphony tell me that this is a pretty faithful-sounding transfer, certainly much better than the synthetic-sounding EMI References set, no longer available. I can imagine, however, that an Opus Kura transfer might be even better, but in the meantime, this set will do.
With one exception, these are great renditions. That exception is the First Movement of the First Symphony. it is simply too fast to register any impact; passages seem to just fly by. Weingartner's earlier set with the Royal Philharmonic is far more spacious and impactful. I must qualify this reservation by saying that the rest of the Symphony is superb. The other symphonies are wonderfully done; my personal favorite is the Fourth, which is done in a reserved, autumnal style that emphasizes the gravity of the work, rather than its volatility (Furtwaengler's is the great example of this latter point of view). Highly recommended!

I have grown leary of buying historic recordings on labels I'm not familiar with. I've gotten burned a couple of times, but fortunately it was for minimal cost. And I have found a couple of nice sounding gems. This set would fall somewhere in between, though I would have preferred a little less filtering. I personally will not buy any of Pearl's transfers from 78's because of the surface noise, though that doesn't bother some people. These aren't like that, but they aren't as good as Dutton or Naxos either (currently this set isn't available on any of the above mentioned labels). But by no means are they like some of those obscure European labels awful transfers that sound like you are under water. I haven't mentioned the material at all, mainly because most people interested in Weingartner know his work and the only question would be sound quality. However, for those who aren't familiar with him, Weingartner doesn't monkey around with the score. He finds the perfect tempo and sticks to it, resulting in possibly the closest thing to the composer actually conducting the performance as you will get.