Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique / Tchaikovsky: Francesca da Rimini

Artistic Quality: 8 Sound Quality: 6 Just in case purchasers of this CD aren’t sure how to respond to the Berlioz, the producers have kindly included more than 30 seconds of tumultuous audience applause, which is disproportionate to the considerable worth of the performance and objectionable to those who prefer to make up their own minds. What next–adding sitcom laugh tracks to tell us there’s humor in a piece of music? That annoyance aside, Rozhdestvensky and the crack Leningrad Orchestra did provide thrills aplenty at this 1971 Proms concert at Albert Hall. At times they come perilously close to going over the top, as in the hurried March to the Scaffold–here more a sprint than a march, making it one of the least scary I’ve ever heard–and in the hallucinatory first-movement Rèveries, which for all its apparent spontaneity seems more a set of disconnected episodes than a coherent symphonic movement. You also might quibble about the slight touch of rigidity in Un bal and do more than quibble about the rawness of the trumpets in the last two movements. But Rozhdestvensky conducts with such broad Romantic sweep and the crack Soviet orchestra displays such big, warm string sound and vitality that such complaints must be minimized. If you’re a fan of Colin Davis’ classically oriented recordings of the work, this makes a worthily contrarian supplement. If you’re an adherent of Munch or Paray, you’ll be satisfied with their superior, even more exciting Fantastiques. The big barn the Brits call Royal Albert Hall isn’t an ideal recording venue, and this BBC early stereo broadcast has muddy bass (though you still can appreciate the powerful, if diffuse, underpinnings supplied by the Leningrad doublebasses), turns raw in climaxes, and places instruments at the back of the orchestra far in the distance. Much better is the monophonic engineering from a 1960 Edinburgh concert–awash in presence and detail–in Tchaikovsky’s Francesca da Rimini. Here, Rozhdestvensky, the second conductor on the orchestra’s tour (its longtime chief, Evgeny Mravinsky, took the night off), turns in an exciting performance of a work it played countless times. The strings, always the orchestra’s great strength, superbly depict the doomed lovers swirling in the winds of Hades, and then, in the central section after the lovely clarinet solo, warmly sing the lovers’ passion. Review by: Dan Davis, classicstoday.com