Nowadays, the majority of classic Beethoven symphony recordings are at mid-price. Attempt to economize further and you are liable to land up in all kinds of trouble, especially with the Pastoral Symphony. Plausible as the above list of selected comparisons might appear, none of the discs is really recommendable. Neither Kempe nor Schmidt-Isserstedt is at his best here—the one laboured, the other oddly arthritic; the Szell is a strangely heartless performance, further compromised by disfiguring levels of tape hiss; the Karajan suffers, notoriously, from an overdriven first movement (though things improve later, and the coupling is a vivid account of the Fifth Symphony).
The new RPO performance under the Leningrad-born Mark Ermler is long-breathed and expressively moulded. Occasionally, detailing is mannered, and there is rather a lumpy account of ''The Scene by the Brook'' (oddly so from a conductor schooled in ballet). Still, in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king and as far as budget and super-budget CDs of the Pastoral are concerned this is certainly in with a chance. The CD has to be played at an unusually high level; and, even then, the strings seem rather too recessed. Happily, the woodwinds are well forward. Indeed, much of the solo wind playing is superb. In the symphony, it is the ensemble playing that is often below par. Chording is often surprisingly ragged.
This isn't the case in the overture. Ermler's account of the Egmont is spacious and expressive, powerful without being laboured or melodramatic. This suggests he might be better suited to darker-browed symphonies than the Sixth.
Klemperer, at mid-price, remains a first choice for the Pastoral. (The Bernstein is also very fine if you want something pacier.) Klemperer adds the Egmont Overture in a well-nigh definitive performance, plus three more numbers from the Egmont music, with Birgit Nilsson as soloist.'