I'm not sure what Nuova Era are trying to achieve with issues of such patently sub-standard material. Like the Gould disc of twentieth-century music reviewed on page 1151, this 1962 recording sounds as though it is taken from a transistor radio in a poor reception area. The playing itself is characteristically cavalier, but uncharacteristically lacking in conviction.
Gould takes a sober view of the Prokofiev sonata, resisting all temptations to virtuoso exaggeration. That's fine. But there are so many pointless changes to the text, most egregiously a cut of ten bars or so in the finale, that one begins to suspect a case of simple carelessness rather than original thought. The best construction I can put on the romanticizing of the slow movement is that Gould has misunderstood its character, a suspicion reinforced by his sleeve-note to his later 1970s CBS recording on LP (nla)—''the second movement with its rather cloying main theme helps to fill the quota of the composer's collective''.
And if anyone wanted to prove that Shostakovich's Quintet is a rather feeble piece they could not do a better job than this. The prelude is bizarrely contorted, the fugue poorly shaped; the finale, following straight on from the fugue, is wholly undistinguished. And yes, the finale does follow straight on; the third and fourth movements are simply omitted. Maybe Gould preferred the piece that way, maybe someone at Nuova Era pressed the wrong switch (after all they have managed to place the second track of the CD three-quarters through the first movement of the Prokofiev rather than at the beginning of the slow movement). Whatever the reason, the omission is not identified on the CD or its booklet. Caveat emptor.
Weighing up the listed comparisons of the Quintet I come out, like MEO, with a slight overall preference for Richter and the Borodin Quartet on EMI. In quite a few places the Decca team of Ashkenazy and the Fitzwilliam Quartet are closer to my personal view of the work, especially in their rollicking scherzo, but there are other things notably Ashkenazy's overblown opening solo, which are difficult to live with. John Bingham and the Medici are not far behind, but fallible intonation, a metallic piano treble and an over-reverberant Nimbus recording rule them out for me.'