A solidly played, warm-toned account of the Fifth Symphony will probably excite someone unfamiliar with the music but it can do little for anyone who has heard the piece conducted by a master like Furtwangler, Klemperer or Erich or Carlos Kleiber, let alone the critic who will have heard the piece too many times for his or her own good.
Previn's new Fifth with the RPO sits a little heavily on the stomach like decent beef rather too thickly cut and too liberally supplied with unsurprising things like gravy and potatoes. This particularly applies to the RPO's playing of the slow movement and the trio of the scherzo. But Previn's rather too moderate view of the first movement must take some of the blame for the lack of excitement and wonder it all brings on. By the time we have been invited to look through the charmed casement opened by the oboe's rapt cadenza, the tension is relatively low. There is little sense of brief visionary release. At the onset of the recapitulation there is no onrush of feeling or sudden spontaneous outflow of emotion such as Weingartner used to engender. I miss any sense of scalp-tightening excitement as the new motif spontaneously breaks in at bar 423; and there is little sense of pathos in the oboe's falling descants in the coda. The symphony's finale is very grand here, but ultimately rather marmoreal.
The recording is clean and lively but in both the symphony and the overtures the RPO playing seems to be geared to that quality of Englishman characterized by Sir Thomas Beecham as not much liking music, but absolutely loving the noise it makes. In Beecham's day the RPO was a subtler, fierier, more quick-witted band than here.'