Kurt Masur has enjoyed the good fortune of recording two complete Beethoven cycles with the Gewandhaus Orchestra for Philips, for no other reason than conductor and ensemble are both German, and therefore (the theory goes) know something about how the music ought to go. Let’s give the orchestra the benefit of the doubt. The fact that Masur never has shown much ability to project Beethoven’s fire or passion, and contents himself with a certain comfortable, generalized musicality, has not prevented his Beethoven recordings from being reissued countless times in countless formats. Masur’s communist credentials gave him the necessary political cachet back in 1970s East Germany, but that’s no excuse today. Why then do the labels do it? Why, for the same reasons male dogs lick their genitalia: because they can.
But that doesn’t mean that they should, nor does it render the spectacle any more appealing. In other words, these unexceptional performances make no better impression in multichannel format then they did the last dozen or so times they were reissued in normal stereo. Nor is the sound itself anything to write home about. Like most of Pentatone’s Philips-licensed productions, this reissue presumably was edited from original quad tapes (assuming they had quad in 1970s East Germany and some other sort of technical fiddling isn’t on offer), which almost guarantees that there will be far too much rear-channel emphasis to provide anything like a realistic concert experience. So it proves.
The strings project from behind the listener, while the woodwinds float somewhere in the middle, along with timpani and brass. Only in the Ninth Symphony does the presence of the choir restore something like a natural front-to-back depth of soundstage. Otherwise, it’s strictly theater in the round, and a dull night of theater at that. Do we need to hear, all over again, Masur’s sleepy Eroica, his tame Fifth, anodyne Pastorale, or workmanlike Ninth? The choice is yours, and in the unlikely event that there are specific performances from this cycle that thrill you, Pentatone has thoughtfully released the five discs individually as well. Yawn.
