Beethoven: Symphonies (All) & Selected Overtures

Anyone who would like to hear Otto Klemperer's legendary interpretations of Ludwig van Beethoven's symphonies should be aware that these remastered 1960 Vienna Festival performances from Music & Arts are no substitute for his classic EMI recordings, which have been hailed as landmarks and reissued numerous times. The sound engineers have done a decent job remastering these concert performances and cleaning up the tapes of unwanted hiss, but the limitations of live analog recording in the mid-20th century are still in ... Read More

Anyone who would like to hear Otto Klemperer's legendary interpretations of Ludwig van Beethoven's symphonies should be aware that these remastered 1960 Vienna Festival performances from Music & Arts are no substitute for his classic EMI recordings, which have been hailed as landmarks and reissued numerous times. The sound engineers have done a decent job remastering these concert performances and cleaning up the tapes of unwanted hiss, but the limitations of live analog recording in the mid-20th century are still in evidence here. The sound overall is small, distant, and compressed, with an obvious loss of upper partials, and the Philharmonia seems squeezed into a box, with the thin upper strings' tone dominating and everybody else homogenized into a murky sonic mass below. Details are difficult to make out, and distinguishing the instruments requires a considerable boost of the volume. This is certainly a worthwhile set for scholarly purposes, and students interested in Klemperer's interpretations... Read Less