Search - Beethoven, Steinberg, Pst :: Symphony 3 & 8

Collossal Interpretation!!

demien | 04/01/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Having performed the "Eroica" for many years now one get pretty intimate with the recorded legacy left on CD from the golden age of record...and much to my surprise we have here one of the finest examples of just how finely wrought Steinberg's ideas about Beethoven are..there is a giant swagger and robustness of approach that surely reccommends itself here. None of this Toscannini copying or emulation...instead the structural integrity of this music is left unsullied by tempi nit-picking. What one hears is an orchestra that is allowed to make a really wide dynamic...not this smooothly glossy overly even sound one hears from Cleveland on occassion. Szell was always a dissapointment to me in Beethoven...he was always choosing tempos that were too slow or too fast for a given movement. Here, instead we are served up Beethoven instead of a fussy ready-made peurile Szell interpretation. Another aspect of Steinberg's immense artisty was his ideas on orchestral sound...there is none of this obscession with blend we get with Szell...instead woodwinds and brass sound like woodwinds and brass....This is well worth investigating if you are a serious collector!"

Where have I been?

C. Wigley | Hesperia, CA | 05/10/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"What a performance! I love it! I have always enjoyed Steinberg and the Pittsburgh in the Brahms Symphonies. I was so much up into Szell and Karajan in the Beethoven Symphonies. I heard Steinberg's 3rd and I almost lost it! It sounded like Bruno Walter with Szell coaching. I love it! I wanted more. But, where do you get more? I went to ebay and found a Beethoven set on lp. I am currently in the process of remastering these to CD. Every one of these symphonies are marvelous. The recording engineers did a marvelous job. It's really hard to believe that I now rank this set beside the Karajan 1963 set. What a wonderful discovery! It's a crime EMI has not re-issued the entire set."