There is one overture here which Daniel Harding seems well equipped to record at this stage in his career. The opening chord progression apart, the Overture to The Creatures of Prometheus (1801) is a cheerful, largely innocuous affair which Harding's wilful, high-octane direction renders mildly dangerous. It is arguable, too, that he brings off the Overtures to The Ruins of Athens and Fidelio, though you may think the performance of the latter, brilliant but angry-sounding, has rather too much of the spirit of Pizarro about it.
Elsewhere, the readings often resemble the kind of thing the ageing Toscanini would occasionally produce on a bad day in Studio 8-H, the music-making driven and dry-toned. In a sense, the Toscanini analogy is a compliment to Harding. It tells us a good deal about his musical persona, actual and potential: the terrific energy levels, the sheer force of his musical will. But that alone cannot conjure forth great music-making, especially when some of the works in question - Coriolan, Egmont, Leonore No 3 - are numbered among the loftier peaks of the theatrical-symphonic repertory.
The performance of Coriolan is especially pitiless: in pulse, and in the self-conscious exacting way the orchestra is 'managed' by this young podium Coriolanus. Modern performance practice has something to do with this: the violin legatos thin-lipped and vibrato-free, the bully-boy tactics of the 'period' drum, the pedantic insistence on certain accompanying voices: in this case, the nervelessly accurate placing of the supporting bassoon line. But it is a lack of dramatic pathos in the reading as a whole which is the real problem.
The Egmont Overture survives rather better, though Harding distorts the germinal short-long-long rhythmic motif by shading away the final note; and in the main Allegro (2'31''-2'37'' and elsewhere) the sledgehammer accents on the first beat of each bar are pure Toscanini, nothing to do with Beethoven. If Beethoven had wanted sfz accents here he would have asked for them. The performance of Leonore No 3 suffers from similar oddities of balance and dynamic. There is some brilliant orchestral playing here but there is again a lack of genuine elation and human warmth.
The overtures have been assembled in a most peculiar order. (The listing above is chronological, not as on the disc.) The recording is tolerably good, clean and bright, albeit with a number of distracting studio noises still in place; and there is a tolerably good note, though the suggestion that the 'Victory Symphony' at the end of the Egmont Overture describes Egmont's 'transcendent moral victory as he is led to the scaffold [my italics]' is a howler of not inconsiderable proportions.'