Unusually so for a Munch performance, this 1962 Pathetique lacks something in sheer dynamism and emotional ardour. With the great Boston orchestra not quite on top form (witness the rather sluggish, surprisingly fallible string-playing at the start of the last two movements, for example), this is an interpretation which somehow never takes flight at all, with outer movements in particular curiously dispassionate and uninvolving. RCA's sound, too, never really expands as it should. The fiery account of Romeo and Juliet from a year earlier, on the other hand, is more like the Munch of old. Although the Alsatian maestro drives hard in the fight-music, the effect is always excitingly clean-limbed. That said, one has heard more noble presentations of Tchaikovsky's glorious love-theme, not least from Claudio Abbado and this same orchestra on DG. A pity, again, about the cloudy, oddly constricted recording. Despite some good things in Romeo, definitely not one of this company's more desirable Munch reissues.'