Nothing is known of the circumstances or conditions in which Mozart's E flat Symphony was first performed (or even whether this was during his lifetime); but in the case of the Symphony in D he wrote at the end of 1786, six weeks before visiting Prague, we do know that the orchestra there, which launched it, consisted of only 25 players—in other words, the number of strings was only marginally greater than that of the wind (which offers much food for thought over the question of balance). The VPO, predictably, were unlikely to experiment with such proportions, and deploy a string strength similar, by the sound of it, to that of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe on ASV (who despite their name are the largest of the bodies listed above), though Levine's lighter approach and more fluent tempos produce a less 'old-fashioned' reading. And what strings they are! Their entry in bar 5 of the Prague Symphony, their statement of its second subject and their expressively shaped cantabile in the Andante (in which they don't, unlike the Conlon/Erato recording, jerk the dotted figure) are like honey, and their first violins are the only ones to give sufficient tone to that F sharp high above everyone else, 20 bars before the end of the first movement; particularly happy are their chuckling trills after featherweight triplets in the finale. As to the wind, they relish all the opportunities Mozart gives them in his wonderful contrapuntal and imitative writing, and Levine ensures that (as for example in the second movement of the E flat) these delectable lines are finely balanced. He avoids making the E flat's first movement too grandiose it isn't, after all, by Beethoven, as so many performances seem to suggest—though he enters fully into the drama of its development section, and unlike Schneider does not impart a military atmosphere to the minuet.
Of all the versions listed above, his is the only one to observe every possible repeat in both works—even of the Prague outer movements' second halves and the reprise of the E flat's minuet (which no one else does)—and he alone feels the need slightly to stress the sudden minor chord in bar 22 of the E flat's Andante and, to my great relief, takes the logical step of letting the first violins rise to F in bar 251 of the Prague finale to balance the parallel phrase in the exposition. Like Marriner on EMI (but not Schneider) he follows Mozart's direction of con moto in the second movement of K543, but he takes its minuet unusually fast (certainly more than Allegretto) and bustles the finale along (incidentally shaping its development section excellently). The 'new wave' authenticity lobby may not be entirely satisfied with this disc, but I enjoyed it immensely.'