These are lean, swiftly paced, competently played performances, with all repeats observed. The Seventh Symphony comes off the better of the two, though a second and third encounter found me hungering for more in the way of fibre, muscle and what one might tentatively call ‘vision’. The Allegretto is relatively deadpan and the finale, although lively enough, seems jammed on autopilot.
The Fourth is rather more complex in that it sports a small handful of eccentricities. In the first movement, at 2'31'', the three quavers that build for the first ff chord are played virtually at the same forte dynamic level, so that Beethoven’s prescribed crescendo doesn’t actually happen. Then, at 3'55'' (from, say, bars 121-30), Drahos colours the ‘marching minim’ crescendo with added accents on every third note. Is this a whim of the conductor, or is it a recently discovered manuscript anomaly? Personally speaking, I prefer the cleaner architecture of the more familiar option. At around 8'23'', where the first movement’s development dips to an excited whisper, Drahos bends the rules and eases the pulse, and although he is in good company (the majority of ‘golden oldies’ do the same sort of thing), this is one area where I feel the period-instrument lobby have got it right: maintain the tempo and the overall effect is doubly dramatic. In the finale, the four-note semiquaver figure that tails those pounding sforzando chords (from bar 66 – 0'57''ff) is virtually inaudible. But, again, many of Drahos’s rivals – even the best of them – are equally slapdash at this point. Which brings me to comparisons (or at least those that fall somewhere below full price). Szell is urgent and articulate (no one delivers a finer Fourth Symphony finale) but the least well recorded; Bernstein is spirited and life-affirming (his Fourth is greatly underrated) and Gielen – my one chosen digital alternative – is swift, impulsive and unfussy. In the Fourth’s first movement, Gielen opts for a straight-through development (no tiresome slowing down) and, like Drahos, he takes all the repeats in both symphonies. So does Bernstein, whereas Szell omits both first-movement exposition repeats but compensates with a fine performance of the King Stephen Overture.
How to sum up? At the last count, there were 72 versions of the Fourth Symphony listed on the Gramophone Database and 87 of the Seventh. Any truly comprehensive appraisal of the situation would monopolize an entire issue of Gramophone, but as to this particular coupling at mid price or less, Gielen, Bernstein and Szell strike me as preferable to Drahos. Naxos’s recordings are excellent, save that the woodwinds are occasionally a mite too closely balanced.'