So far, Christoph von Dohnanyi's Beethoven symphonies don't appear to have generated much enthusiasm in these pages. After one hearing of his Pastoral I found this a little odd, for it gave me a great deal of pleasure, despite of somewhat less than stirring 'thunderstorm'. The first movement bounces along at a sprightly tempo (not far below the stipulated minim = 66), every detail articulated with gentle but uncompromising clarity; while the ''Scene at the brook'' has moment of haunting loveliness, and the woodwind playing—beautiful though quite without taint of self-admiration—never fails to delight. In the scherzo, however, the sounds of the pleasant festivities seem to be airborn from a distance rather than experienced at first hand—very nice, but is it quite appropriate? Isn't the playing just a little too refined—too cautious? That's certainly the case in the 'thunderstorm': not much awe here, or even a momentary tingle, and therefore little sense of the miraculous as the music returns to F major calm for the finale. Perhaps this is the fundamental flaw in Dohnanyi's Beethoven: his Leonore No. 3 is also beautifully conceived and executed, with phrases finely shaped and articulated and long crescendos expertly controleed, but it doesn't exactly blaze or surge.
Three versions of the Pastoral are up for comparison. None offers so fresh a first movement, and not even Walter (CBS) can match the alluring beauty of Dohnanyi's ''Scene at the brook'', but all three, I feel, manage to combine greater diversity of mood and character with a more profound sense of integration. And in the end it's Wand (Deutsche Harmonia Mundi/EMI) who seems to me to stand out: listening to his account of the ''Scene at the brook,'' or the closing pages of the finale, I'm reminded of William Blake's remark on seeing a Constable landscape for the first time— ''Why this is vision!'' There's a remarkable faithfulness here, both to the spirit and the letter (even in such niceties as the horn articulation at the opening of the finale). Dohnanyi's version impresses at first, and then doubts begin to creep in; with Wand it's quite the reverse.'