Dutoit's beautifully honed account of the Fifth should make more of an impression than it does. His choices are wise, the playing eloquent, the engineering first class. So where and why, then does it fall short? Temperament, I suspect: that elusive aura, the ability constantly to surprise us to quicken our senses from one bar to the next. If I might leap ahead to the mad mechanical coda of the finale: one comes away from it here feeling as if there were something more still to give, an energy as yet untapped. Turn to Karajan's 1968 recording (DG—nla) or Slatkin (RCA—nla) to cite. my two favourite contenders—and you are out of your seat before the final chord has sounded.
But first things first. With Dutoit's opening movement we seem more than ever to have stepped back into the world of Romeo and Juliet. His line is broad and luxuriant (marginally slower than Karajan, a good deal faster than Slatkin), radiantly self-assured, fully appreciative of all the textural delights encountered en route, as it were: the oily bass clarinet interjections and strange ethereal pizzicati effects just after fig. 10 tempo 1 (4'38''); the sweep and swoop of the horn writing—with one particularly notable moment as they rise, a clear full-blooded ff espresivo, from the pained harmonies building at around 9'28''. The big 'ice-breaking' climax some pages later is superficially very exciting and brings splendidly dramatic cracks from the timpani and bass drum. Yet Dutoit could still make far more of the tiny internal frictions active throughout this movement. Those nervy little animatos don't tingle as they might, one should constantly be aware that at any moment Prokofiev could, and probably will, pull the rug from beneath us.
There should be an element of unease, too, about the scherzo. I like the suave, wry trio delivered with the wink of an eye and the shrug of a Swiss shoulder—just perfect—but elsewhere I miss the sardonic sneer, the mordant colouring, not least at the infamous l'istesso tempo passage where Dutoit could lean more grotesquely on the nagging trombones. The slow movement is most beautifully played, the shimmering final pages bathed in an almost indecently rosy glow. Likewise that lovely solo for the divided cellos at the opening of the finale. The personable Montreal woodwinds come well into their own here, though I do miss that last degree of pungency in the colouring: Karajan gets it from the cultured Berliners, and better still there is Jansons's Leningrad Philharmonic on Chandos—though I have come to find his consistently urgent speeds increasingly difficult to take. My personal choice all-ound would be for Slatkin's expansive, even decadent view on RCA, though I wouldn't be without the Karajan either—one of the best things he has ever put on record. The technical superiority of Dutoit's Decca recording does nothing to waver those conclusions—and nor does his elegant curtain-raising account of the Classical Symphony, initially a little on the measured side, I thought, but inflected with undeniable charm.'