The booklet may be skimpy, but at this price few are likely to resist two indisputable classics of the gramophone. Apart from a touch of glare, one can listen to the Koussevitzky Fifth without making too many allowances for its ‘historical’ status. This is the sort of Dutton transfer that reduces 78rpm hiss to a minimum without reshaping the sound so radically that one starts to have doubts. The performance as such remains irresistible. Perhaps it is only possible to play like this when confronted by the shock of the new (or almost new), before over-familiarity dulls the response of orchestra and conductor.
Koussevitzky in Boston, like Karajan in Berlin (see review opposite), offers a large-scale interpretation with more lustrous string tone than the composer himself could ever have elicited in Moscow. It is not Koussevitzky’s fault if his hand-copied score contains a fair number of errors: lots of dodgy accidentals, an a tempo return to the Scherzo in the second movement and a painful gaffe in the melody line 3'32'' into the finale. The blazing commitment is never in doubt. I did wonder about the provenance of Dutton’s source material. Do all copies of the 78 side that ends 4'03'' into the slow movement really produce the same distracting whistle? You heard it on the previous CD transfer (RCA, 4/95) and you’ll hear it here, too.
It is fascinating to have Prokofiev’s pioneering account of the Third Piano Concerto as the coupling, though the LSO under Piero Coppola, then a regular conductor for HMV France, is sorely taxed by the sheer volatility of the idiom. Dutton’s transfer cannot disguise the distortion on the original source material and the piano tone is none too well focused, but you can hear that the composer still played with considerable polish in 1932. That playing is less emollient than, say, Bartok’s, but Prokofiev does not thump, and of subsequent exponents only William Kapell (RCA, 1/99) and Martha Argerich (DG, 12/95) display greater dexterity and forward thrust. Glenn Gould once ranked Prokofiev’s keyboard writing alongside that of Liszt and Scarlatti, citing its ability to achieve ‘maximum effect for minimum effort’. The present performance suggests that Prokofiev was peculiarly adept at those giddy acrobatic leaps and softer-grained, etude-like runs. Recommended.'