Earlier issues in this super-budget series have been coolly received in these columns – Nos. 3 and 7 (10/95), No. 6 (1/96), No. 5 (7/96). Small wonder if they are all like this! This performance of the Classical Symphony must be the most laboured on record. All the movements, save the finale, are too slow: Theodore Kuchar takes nearly five minutes over the first as opposed to Koussevitzky, who conducted it in the early years of its life, and made it sparkle at three minutes and 23 seconds! The Second Symphony reveals the weakness of the string section whose melodic line is swamped by the brass and Kuchar brings a conspicuous lack of imagination to the variation movement. Again there is too little sense of momentum. Nor do the early rarities sway matters.
The orchestral playing in the Autumnal sketch is very pedestrian, not a patch on Ashkenazy and the LSO, and Dreams is far better served by Jarvi and Rozhdestvensky. Naxos have yet to reach the Fourth Symphony and if they do both the 1930 version commissioned by Koussevitzky and its post-war revision on the same CD or on separate discs, the project will run to five or six bargain CDs – which means that this cycle is no bargain at all, given what else is available these days at mid price. Not recommended.'