Collectors who swear by their fine old 1950s mono LPs of the Beethoven symphonies made in the Concertgebouw under conductors like Erich Kleiber, Eugen Jochum, Eduard van Beinum or Pierre Monteux will find Sawallisch's new Concertgebouw recording of the First Symphony to be a great delight. True, the slow movement is rather comatose – Andante cantabile but barely con moto – but all three quicker movements are played with a clarity and zest that you will not find, for instance, in Harnoncourt's performance, where the first movement is played in a way that is oddly tired-sounding: mannered and circumspect. The EMI recording for Sawallisch is of a piece with the playing, electrically alive.
In the Eroica, Sawallisch does one or two old-fashioned things. There is no exposition repeat and there are some expressive slowings in the course of the exposition. What follows is, though, of a piece with this: a reading that has an irresistible and continuing sense of forward motion but not one that is bought at all cost, as Sawallisch's direction of the long and musically profound lead-back to the recapitulation makes abundantly clear. In a note to his recent Argo recording of Elgar's Second Symphony, Sir Charles Mackerras makes the interesting observation that ''Today's conductor finds this freedom of beat rather difficult to follow – feeling, I suppose, that the very basis of their art is to set a tempo and stick to it''. Though I would not necessarily want to suggest that Sawallisch's conducting of the Eroica's first movement is always as probingly acute as, say, Klemperer's, it is none the less of an order of interest that we can no longer take for granted in an age of metronome mania where the alternative is the kind of slithery pragmatism we have from Harnoncourt in the Eroica.
Gunther Herbig also conducts a thoroughly old-fashioned performance in terms of the text (no exposition repeat, the coda of the first movement turned into a trumpet-led Victory Symphony, the finale's oboe-led Poco Andante desperately slow). Superimposed on this, though, is a thrust and textural gloss that is thoroughly modern. It is not the subtlest Eroica ever recorded, and at 55 minutes, the disc is not well filled, but at a selling price of under £5 it cannot be entirely ignored. However, it does not really have the pedigree of Sawallisch and the Concertgebouw at their best – which, on this newest disc, is about 80 per cent of the time. R1 '9506004'