After the shocking excellence of its recent Svetlanov Scheherazade, BBC Legends returns to form with this next installment in its “Worst Recordings Ever Made by a Theoretically Great Conductor” series. Actually, there’s nothing especially terrible here, beyond (1) the usual loudly honking oboes (try the first theme of the Unfinished); (2) the ragged strings (in the Schubert Fifth especially); (3) slack rhythms (try to figure out the note values at the opening of the Mozart’s slow movement, or note the plodding opening of the Unfinished’s Andante [not especially] con moto); and (4) the annoyingly compressed dynamic range of these two mono and one stereo air-checks. Typically, the stereo Schubert Fifth, from the acoustically impossible Royal Albert Hall, sounds worse than the two mono recordings (and talk about a piece of music that has no business being played in that space. . .!).
Aside from a certain general vigor in the allegros, there is absolutely nothing here that you can’t find done better in multiple recordings easily had elsewhere; nor are there any “insights” that proclaim these performances as special products of Barbirolli’s artistic genius–and therefore worthy of preservation. They are simply mediocre taped simulacra of an unimpressive day’s work on three different occasions in 1962, ’65, and ’68, and as such they should not have been released. At very full price ($19 at Tower Records), discs such as this represent one of the more obviously poor values in today’s glutted market. Of course, the conductor’s many fans won’t care, and if they want to fork over the bucks anyway, far be it from me to deny them their fix. Others should stay away, lest you wind up feeling like one of those Antiques Road Show hopefuls anticipating a windfall only to discover that you got snookered into purchasing an expensive fake.
