Christoph von Dohnanyi's readings of the Fifth and Seventh Symphonies are smoothly, perhaps at times too smoothly, executed. Phrasing is fluent, tempos are consistently on the swift side though with no sustained effort to meet the quicker metronome markings or, alternatively, marry tempos productively as the older conductors used to do (Klemperer matching a bar of the Scherzo to half a bar of the finale to give the arrival of the finale of the Fifth a wonderful sense of inevitability).
The Cleveland playing in some of the blazing tuttis of the outer movements of the Seventh is very fine, with some of the electricity we remember from the Szell era, but elsewhere the playing, mirrored by the smooth, slightly recessed Telarc recording, leaves one vanting something rather more trenchant or incisive in this music. The start of the finale of the Seventh should not slip down, as it does here, with all the effortlessness of half a dozen oysters. And the older I get the more pointless I think it is playing this finale without the violins divided left and right in the Klemperer-Kubelik-Kleiber manner, without the division the coda becomes a hubbub rather than a debate, more stampede than music drama. Other details: Dohnanyi equals out the fermatas at the start of the Fifth Symphony (the text is in dispute here) and he is generally mean with repeats. Neither finale has its exposition repeat, nor does the first movement of the Seventh Symphony. For those seeking this coupling on CD, Haitink's new Philips readings remain a clear first choice; alternatively, Carlos Kleiber's DG versions, somewhat uneconomically laid out on individual discs, are in a class of their own.'