Svetlanov exercises plenty of old-fashioned conductorial authority over this 1981 recording of the Eroica. Trenchantly and expressively played it is a bold, broad, forthright reading with a degree of ferocity in the playing that protects it from the blandness of many a recorded Eroica from the West. The recording is similarly large-scale, with plenty of ambient space round it, but since the orchestra appears to be very much up to full strength there is plenty of immediacy and impact despite the relatively soft-grained horn sound and a tendency towards woodwind reticence in some tuttis. The slow movement sounds like a real threnody for a real person with its potent mixture of sobriety and strong emotion; perhaps it is simply that the Russians take state ceremonial music with a seriousness that we have rather lost in the West for all the heritage-style splendour of our showpiece occasions. In the coda of the first movement—which has its exposition repeat—Svetlanov uses the usual faulty text and thus realigns the climax points and falsifies the peroration's dramatic import. But, then, the conductors who play the right text are few and far between.
The recordings of the overtures, decently played and strong on the anguish in Parsifal and the melodrama in Der fliegende Hollander, are from 1977 and 1972 respectively. I cannot imagine myself going back to them very often but they help fill out a record that has the considerable virtue of avoiding the facelessness of many comparable rival Western recordings.'