Search - Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky, Antal Dorati :: Tchaikovsky: 1812 Overture, Romeo & Juliet, etc...

Good Value on the 1812 and a Very Good Romeo

Eugene G. Barnes | Dunn Loring, VA USA | 03/19/2001

(5 out of 5 stars)

"When Dorati signed on to become Detroit's newest musical director in 1978, he promised to get the symphony recording again. Straightaway he brought in London/Decca to lay down some initial tracks. The engineers discovered a decaying old movie theater downtown (the so-called "United Artists Auditorium") that had excellent acoustics for recording. Good businessman that he always was, Dorati figured he could repeat the success he had with Mercury many years ago by re-recording the "1812." They pulled out all the stops, complete with recording a brand-new reproduction of the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, the bells of Washington, DC's National Cathedral, and genuine Civil War cannon, all superimposed later in the editing process. The end result was another sonic blockbuster, of course, although it never sold as many copies as Dorati or the DSO wished. Here it is now, along with the accompanying fillers of "Capriccio Italien" and "Marche Slave" that were on the original LP, all on an attractively priced budget CD with great remastered end-of-analog era sound. Dorati's interpretations of the scores are as good as ever, but there are, sad to say, a few measures where the DSO sounds a bit ragged. Still, it's a good value.And to get the CD up to 60 minutes, London has added an earlier (1974) Dorati/National Symphony (Washington, DC) recording from his years of being their director. Now here's a discovery! This recording of Tchaikovsky's "Romeo and Juliet" is among the finest I have ever heard. There's clarity, there's commitment, and there's a forward driving force that's appropriately paced in all but one brief passage where it sounded a bit peremptory. This may be the "Romeo" to make you forget you heard it a million times!"