Szell regularly conducted foreign orchestras at the Salzburg Festival in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s: the Berlin Philharmonic in 1957, the year Karajan broke the Vienna Philharmonic’s monopoly of the festival concert programmes, the Concertgebouw Orchestra in 1958, the French National Radio Orchestra in 1959, the Staatskapelle Dresden in 1961, the Czech Philharmonic in 1963, and, finally, his own Cleveland Orchestra in 1967. These present recordings come from a 1963 all-Beethoven concert that also included the C minor Piano Concerto with Rudolf Firkusny as soloist.
Szell was always a wonderfully lucid exponent of the Eroica Symphony. As IM noted in his review of the reissue of Szell’s exceptionally fine late 1950s Cleveland recording (coupled with the Eighth Symphony), this is a reading very much after the manner of Toscanini, in sound incomparably better than any Toscanini ever received in this symphony.
Paradoxically, Salzburg’s Grosse Festspielhaus sounds almost as dry as the notorious old NBC Studio 8-H, making the Czech Philharmonic sound even gruffer than they probably were. The reading is essentially the same as on the Cleveland disc, but rather darker-browed in the outer movements and slightly slower. This will please those of Szell’s admirers who find the Cleveland recording a shade too fluent and virtuosic. But the fact is, the Czech PO simply could not cope with the music at Szell’s usual speeds. As it is, the first horn makes a horrendous mistake in the first movement bridge into the recapitulation. Since this is one of the most numinous of all Beethoven’s orchestral transitions, and also a critical staging post in the movement’s harmonic development (F and D flat = C sharp sitting astride the tonic), it is alone enough to rule the disc out of contention. (This, despite an account of the Egmont Overture of huge integrity, movingly delivered by the Czech players.) If you don’t know it, however, do try Szell’s Cleveland Eroica, also on Sony, a great budget-price bargain.'