The CD version has arrived before the LP (not yet scheduled), an expensive offering even if the usual concern for vividly immediate sound which one associates with this American label is particularly evident in the new medium. With a weighty bass—the timpani so clear that the player might be a concerto soloist—and good bite from the brass, the concerto has one immediately involved, the more so when under Ozawa the Boston orchestra plays with feeling and polish. the piano sound is more open to criticism, and so—one has regretfully to say—is the playing of the octogenarian Serkin. The piano tone is a little twangy in a metallic way, and though that could well reflect the distinctive sound Serkin draws from the instrument, it is far from ideal. What remains in the reading from Serkin's long-acknowledged mastery and insight are countless felicities of phrasing and inflection—as in his magical rendering of the haunting G minor and F minor melodic passages at the beginning of the development. I personally find his unevenness and the occasional inaccuracy in passagework (noticeable particularly in the left hand) less worrying here than in his Mozart. Ruggedness goes with a fine feeling for expressive detail. What is missing however is the old fire. Too much sounds a little cautious and unlike, say, Wilhelm Kempff, whose natural sense of poetry, has always been a central element of his mastery, Serkin brings few compensating delights in these relaxed Allegros and fast Adagio. It is specially disappointing that at a relatively fast speed the slow movement is uninvolving, thus conveying little of the weighty tension one associates with Serkin, and the episode in thirds even sounds like early Chopin.
The Fantasia is a welcome bonus, though there too the opening is so deliberate that tension is slow to build, and the weaknesses of the piece are all too readily exposed. This after all should simulate one of Beethoven's improvisations, and any hint of cautiousness is damaging. Even so, with strong and enthusiastic Tanglewood Festival forces, the result is bluff and enjoyable. The recorded sound is vivid in this choral work as in the concerto, but the sound of soloists and chorus is curiously inconsistent. The soloist are rather distant in a believable reverberant acoustic, while the chorus homes in much closer with rather dry, aggressive sound.'