This is a difficult CD to review. First, we must question its purpose. All three of the featured recordings have been issued on CD before, in better couplings, and in the appropriate Full Dimensional Sound series to boot. The La Mer can be found with the Ravel Daphnis et Chloe Suite No. 2 (the original LP coupling), the Rimsky-Korsakov Scheherazade was coupled with William Steinberg’s very good recording of the same composer’s Le Coq d’Or Suite, and the Russian Easter was, as on the original LP, part of a collection of virtuoso orchestral showpieces. The odd coupling we get now is held together only by virtue of the fact that Erich Leinsdorf is the conductor. It seems unlikely that someone looking for La Mer is at the same time in the market for Scheherazade, or vice versa. So if Leinsdorf is the glue holding this collection together, what of him?
Leinsdorf was an underrated conductor, and as a good disciplinarian he got excellent technical results out of most of the ensembles he directed. He had a good ear for orchestral color and detail, and he always paced things right on the mark. His forte was opera, though, where singers and choruses, acting out plots and texts, provided inspiration that sometimes seems missing in his orchestral work. What we have here are three entirely competent recordings of basic repertoire that nevertheless lack the magic that we find in the reference recordings. The same might be said of the later 1950s Capitol FDS sound. It is quite good, but the competition has done it better. There is gold in the FDS vaults, but rather than tap it, the series producer seems bent on re-releasing the same material for the second and third time. The program notes are shabby, too. Though the original information is expanded to tell us that Leinsdorf died in 1993, there’s not a word about his tenure as music director of the Boston Symphony.
