The first thing you are likely to notice about this record, apart from the general fizz and paciness of Levine's conducting and the bloom and beauty of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra's playing, is the acoustic. I don't know how many Manhattan Centers there have been in New York, the shelf-life of any building these days being distressingly short, but this big, blowzy room sounds remarkably like the one Glenn Gould anatomized in his essay ''Stokowski in Six Scenes''. Gould described it as a ''shaggily elegant ballroom that appears to have given up its grooming after the last debutante chose it for her first curtsy to society''. As a recording venue, he suggested, it has just one natural blessing—''a generous decay which adds ambient interest to music that is neither contrapuntally complex nor intellectually challenging''.
The Eroica, it hardly needs saying, is both. Indeed, it says much for Levine's orchestra and his evident mastery over it—the performance rich in cleanly delivered, finely moulded detail—that we hear as much as we do. And yet within a minute of the start it is evident that the symphony is going to be taken hostage by the pro-string, anti-wind balance. To some extent, the balance is corrected in what is by any standards a luminously clear and finely moulded reading of the Funeral March. Even here, though, the horns are unduly backward.
And so they remain, until a rather obviously hyped and stage-managed last-movement coda. In the Trio of the Scherzo they sound as if they are off-stage. That might be put down to 'atmospheric' balancing, but it is difficult to explain away their failure to make any real impact in the final bars of the Scherzo.
Similarly, you might think it right that near the start of the first-movement development the sfp violin rejoinder should challenge the oboe's dolce song; yet it can't be right that the oboe's solo after the development's excoriating climax (''a song of pain after the Holocaust'', as Leonard Bernstein somewhat romantically put it) should be so muted, so blurred.
As always with suspect recordings, it all sounds much better if you have a score to hand; the eye confirming what the ear half grasps. Even then, though, I was left wondering what this performance was about—apart, that is, from the splendour of the musical instrument Levine has fashioned for himself in New York. In particular, the first movement of the Eroica passes by rather too smoothly and quickly for comfort. In the slow movement, Levine's reading is often scrupulously rooted in the detail of Beethoven's text, but in the first movement I found myself going back to Klemperer (for dramatic gravitas) and Bruno Walter (for greater richness of expressive inflexion and some sense of the music's tragic undertow). In his treatment of the text (trumpets extended at bars 658ff, and so on) Levine is very much a traditionalist; what his reading lacks is the humane depth of some of those older traditionalist readings.
Generously, the disc also includes Schubert's Unfinished Symphony. Here, though, there is little to admire. Once past the first movement, the performance of the Eroica has much to recommend it. By contrast, the performance of the Unfinished is fatally undermined by the persistent imbalance between full-fed, rather loud strings and pale, rather quiet woodwinds. The effect, in what is rather a quick account of the first movement, is bullish and extrovert—light years away from the quiet, the interiority, the otherwordly beauty of Carlos Kleiber's highly collectable performance with the Vienna Philharmonic. '