Pinchas Zukerman dispatches Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto with his customary confidence, bright tone, and polished execution. He makes his instrument sing in the long-spun melodies and flits lightly through the mercurial passages of the finale. In short, he does his job well. However, due to the murky, cavernous recording it’s hard to gauge how well the Cologne Radio Symphony is doing–especially the woodwinds (quite important in this work), which are pretty much obscured for most of the performance.
These same sonic problems lead to near-disastrous results in La Mer. The engineers seem to have positioned the microphones to capture maximum reverberation and minimum detail. Again, this mostly affects the woodwinds, though they oddly zoom into prominence at unexpected moments (such as halfway through the first movement). The persistent echo makes the strings sound uncoordinated in rapid passages, and the orchestra as a whole appears to be out of tune–surely not something Giulini would countenance, as evidenced by his three commercial recordings of the work, all of which feature pretty much the same interpretation (though he did get progressively slower over time) with far superior playing and recording. You should turn to one of those if you want to hear him in this music. As for the Mendelssohn, there are scores of other, better versions available.
