It is good to have this refined and warmly expressive performance of Harold in Italy at Naxos’s super-budget price. If this version hardly matches those I have listed above, including two at mid price – the Menuhin/Davis and the Bernstein – the reason is almost entirely due to the recording balance. The San Diego Symphony are an excellent orchestra, impressive in every department, and Talmi is a sympathetic interpreter, but the recording is set in an over-reverberant acoustic with the players at a distance. The dark textures at the start of the Introduction are not just murky but dim and unclear as well, and from then on the impact of the performance is consistently diminished by the distancing, not least at the end of the “Orgy of Brigands”, marked Allegro frenetico, where some first-rate playing lacks the edge and bite it plainly would have were it more sharply focused. The soloist is adversely affected too, for Rivka Golani in one of her most warmly sympathetic performances on disc is also set at a distance. Her reading is less involving as a result, though the delicacy of her dynamic shading comes over well, not least on her first entry in the lyrical motto theme, with the pianissimo second statement making one catch one’s breath. Speeds are well chosen, with Talmi most convincingly taking the “Pilgrims’ March” at a rather more flowing speed than usual.
Happily, the fill-ups offer sound with rather more body, though in the same acoustic (Copley Symphony Hall, San Diego) one still wants more immediacy. Les Francs-juges is given a light and refined reading, with a chamber quality in some of the string playing, but it is the performance of the Reverie et caprice with the San Diego leader as soloist which proves the most magnetic on the disc. Igor Gruppman was born in the Ukraine and trained in Moscow, winning a prize in 1979 to study with Heifetz. On this showing he richly deserves a concerto recording of his own. With his tenderly expressive playing, he consistently maintains tension through the improvisatory passages of this tricky piece, gloriously rich and true of tone in every register with playing full of fantasy: I hope we hear much more of him.'