Return with me, if you will, to those halcyon days when men were men and communists were taken seriously. Back in the 1970s, Germany had three major orchestras, two of which (those of Leipzig and Dresden) were locked behind the Iron Curtain. Here in the West, Herbert von Karajan and Berlin were hogging all of the attention, but the sound of the other two was arguably more “echt Deutsch”. This doesn’t mean that the conducting was better. Kurt Masur was, and remains, a workaday musician, a good orchestral trainer who oddly, like Karajan, was seldom at his best in the standard German repertoire. His best recordings include some Russian music and his Liszt orchestral works for EMI.
Masur recorded two Beethoven symphony cycles, neither of which is special, but this set of overtures finds him and the orchestra in very good form. Everyone will have a preference for individual works: Munch’s unsurpassed Coriolan, or Szell in Egmont, for example, but taken as a set this really is competitive. Tempos are lively, rhythms cut nicely, and the woodwind parts penetrate. The two big Leonore overtures come across particularly well, while the fugal interplay of The Consecration of the House has plenty of energy. The sonics have dated a bit: “Quad” (originally what this was) was a failure, and it’s no better in surround format; but in stereo the orchestra sounds warm and present. I don’t mean to damn this with faint praise: it’s definitely worth a listen.
