Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5 / Capriccio Italien ~ Szell

Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky (Composer), George Szell (Conductor), Cleveland Orchestra (Orchestra) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Orchestra: Cleveland Orchestra
• Conductor: George Szell
• Composer: Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky
• Audio CD (June 6, 2006)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Sony
• ASIN: B000F6YW26
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #22,080 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Awesome 5th! Buy it!!!!, July 29, 2006

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A Music Fan - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5 / Capriccio Italien ~ Szell (Audio CD)

The Performace: The Cleveland Symphony displays their usual excellence - disciplined, accurate, and beauty of sound. Szell's interpretation sounds unique to my ears - very different from Mravinsky and Muti, but no less authentic or beautiful in a layman's opinion.

The Sound: This recording was remastered with the new Direct Stream Digital (DSD) technology and Sony's SBM process. The recording has a warm, bassy sound and a wide stereo image. Just a little bit of tape hiss which is natural for a recording this old. Real nice.

I hope Szell's Beethoven symphonies and piano concertos get the same remastering treatment one day.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A much-loved Szell classic returns in excellent sonics, June 14, 2006

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Santa Fe Listener (Santa Fe, NM USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5 / Capriccio Italien ~ Szell (Audio CD)

I smiled at the comment made by another Amazon reviewer that George Szell wasn't known for romantic longing. He was warm for an ice cube. This famous Tchaikovsky Fifth has been admired for over forty years for the polish of the Cleveland Orch. and Szell's disciplined refusal to give in to emotional indulgence. The reading is what it is, and now Sony has done the decent thing and remastered the original hissy, shrill sonics so that they sound quite up to date.

With hindsight, I'm not sure bleaching the romance out of Tchaikovsky is all that admirable, but when the LP came out, there was no Mravinsky to compare it to, or Karajan for that matter. Bernstein hadn't yet made his super-charged NY Phil. recording, either. That means we lacked the full measure of the Fifth's tragedy and soul. In that context the Szell reading came as a revelation, which some listeners continue to believe it still is.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Still One of the Best Versions of the Tchaikovsky 5th Symphony, April 13, 2007

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John Kwok (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5 / Capriccio Italien ~ Szell (Audio CD)

Those interested in recent recordings only of the Tchaikovsky 5th Symphony have several excellent choices, of which the most noteworthy include interpretations conducted by Daniele Gatti and Valery Gergiev. And then of course there are the classic "vintage" recordings from the likes of Mravinsky, Karajan and Bernstein. To these one should also add Szell's late 1950s recording with the Cleveland Orchestra, which remains noteworthy for being among the swiftest, least emotional interpretations of the 5th symphony that I've heard of. Much to Sony's credit, this relatively recent re-issue sounds quite superb due to state-of-the-art digital remastering (via Direct Stream Digital (DSD) and Sony's proprietary SBM technology) that's made this a sonically richer recording than earlier LP and CD versions, emphasizing the rich sonorities of The Cleveland Orchestra's polished, brilliant performance under Szell's no-nonsense direction, which emphasizes a strict adherence to Tchaikovsky's score, without resorting to emotional over-indulgence. The orchestra's performance of Tchaikovsky's "Capriccio Italien" is equally appealing too, for which I must observe that it remains one of the best recorded versions of this work as well. So potential purchasers interested in superb performances of two of Tchaikovsky's most popular orchestral works should be quite interested in this recording, now a venerable classic from Sony's classical music vault.