Sony has many excellent versions of Pictures at an Exhibition in its catalog, including the finest of all: Ormandy/Philadelphia. Bernstein and Szell are also pretty terrific, and this version is very good if not quite on that level. Certainly Thomas Schippers has the measure of the piece. He’s particularly adept at digging into the music’s darker recesses, such as Gnomus, Bydlo, Goldenberg and Schmuyle, and Catacombae. Other performances bring more brilliance to Limoges and to the concluding two numbers, but with impressive playing from the New York Philharmonic there’s little here to criticize. It’s just that others are better still, and I am perpetually amazed that the Ormandy version, one of the historical best sellers in the old Columbia catalog, has only been reissued in Japan and France.
About Nevsky, though, there can be no doubt: this unquestionably is one of the reference recordings. It’s simply exciting as hell, with the most thrilling Battle on the Ice ever recorded. Schippers captures the music’s raw cinematic edge as have few before or since. The Crusaders in Pskov is harrowing, and the Westminster Choir sings its numbers with an entirely apt, earthy vigor. So many performances soft-pedal music that needs to be played at full-throttle from first note to last, and here’s an interpretation that does just that. The sonics are a bit dated in the sense of being comparatively two-dimensional and uniformly high-level, but in this piece even that is a fault in the right direction. For Nevsky alone, this disc is worth its very modest asking price.
