Customer Reviews

Tchaikovsky 1812 Overture / Beethoven Wellington's Victory / Liszt Battle of Huns / Kunzel, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra

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Excellent versions of two compositions celebrating the defeat of Napoleon: 1812 by Tchaikovsky, and the seldom-heard Wellington's Victory (Beethoven); plus a few bonus selections, played by a first-class orchestra conducted by Erich Kunzel. The sound quality is excellent. I recommend this CD to all audiophiles and classical music lovers.

I can't really recall why I bought this pair of warhorses from Amazon . . . it seemed a good idea at the time, perhaps? As a budding classical music fan in the early 1960s, I remember listening to the Tchaikovsky 1812 with reverence and awe; the Beethoven piece I found much later, paired with the Tchaikovsky chesnut on a Philadelphia Orchestra LP. Both are dramatic, a workout for your stereo, but there's nothing new here, in either recording. But anyone who buys this disc surely does not want or expect anything new . . . no doubt my yawn is occasioned by the simple fact that I've heard this music far too many times to find anything exciting in it now that I'm no longer that adolescent boy discovering classical standards. I wish I could recapture the thrill of such new discoveries, but alas, it rarely happens now that I'm 61. These are competent recordings, but to me it is just "same old, same old."

Here's 70 minutes of bombast that Eric Kunzel tries hard to turn into music, with some success. Kunzel has become something of a middle American pops success in crossover classical recordings and now has more acclaim in crossover than in top 200 classcial recordings.

His work here competes in two very discrete arenas -- with CDs like Antal Dorati's souped up 40-year-old Mercury recording of "1812 Overture" and others that has sold more than 2 million copies; and in the so-called "battle" CDs that always include "1812 Overture", "Wellington's Victory" and "Battle of the Huns". These are all performed on this CD along with Tchaikovsky's "Capriccion Italian" and "Cossack Dance from 'Mazeppa'" and Liszt's "Hungarian March to the Assault".

What typifies Kunzel's approach is musicality in the face of bombast and a tendency to clip phrases at the end of loud sections of the music. His style works best in "Capriccio Italian", a warhorse lots of conductors turn into 15 real loud minutes of piercing tones. Kunzel restrains the Cincinnati Symphony and used flexible tempos to create a muscial picture of Italy.

He tries this with "1812 Overture" and "Wellington's Victory" too, but it doesn't work very well because this is not very good music. It is, in fact, bombast. Ditto for "Battle of the Huns", which is still best performed all out by the young Zubin Mehta and the L.A. Philharmonic on a CD now only available from Australian Decca.

I did not particularly enjoy the digital enhancements engineered into Kunzels' "1812 Overture" and the digitally-created muskets of "Wellington's Victory". The "1812" closing pages are simply too loud for anyone except people that want to blow their woofers or really anger their neighbors. The CD case even includes a warning that the recording could damage your equipment!

The best version I ever heard of "Wellington" was an old Musical Heritage Society recording of a woodwind quintet and timpani group. They played it as music, not bombast, without all the silly marching and shooting. Antal Dorati's later recording of "1812" with either the Detroit or National Symphony Orchestra on a London collection does all the things Kunzel does here with better style.

Until the final "Hungarian March to the Assualt", I wondered why the engineers didn't do much with the timpani on this recording. It is not at all prominent in "Wellington" or "Battle of the Huns" while it would like to drive you through the wall in "1812". They pumped up the drum volume a great deal in the closing march, which is a fitting end to this 70 minute collection of noisy stuff.

This will probably satisfy people that want this music on one CD in modern DDD sound. It is probably as good as the similar collection by Maazel although it also includes a lot of artificial noise. Yet Kunzel tries hard to make music of this hay and sometimes succeeds. Other times, he'd have been better off just blowing the roof off the place like he does at the end of "1812 Overture".