Seiji Ozawa’s Prokofiev cycle has taken its share of hard knocks over the years, and deservedly so, though I believe most of the problem lies with the orchestra, which hasn’t a clue about how this music should sound. Curiously (or perhaps not), the best performance here is the Fifth Symphony, the one work–aside from the “Classical” Symphony–that the orchestra recorded successfully before, under Karajan. The latter piece isn’t too bad either, but then again it seldom fails to charm. As for the rest, the Berlin band plays well enough in lightly scored passages, but whenever the music calls for the sort of intensity and crushing power that Russian music lives by, the chronic weakness of the low brass and heavy percussion and the serious lack of rhythmic heft ruins practically every movement. You needn’t look far for proof of this fact: try the first movement climax of the Sixth Symphony, or anywhere in the Second or Third Symphonies, which consist largely of nothing BUT hysterical climaxes.
DG’s shallow, multi-miked sound doesn’t help either. There’s a particularly loathsome example of this at the beginning of the Sixth Symphony where “Jumbo the Killer Oboe”, clacking keys and all, wreaks havoc with instrumental balances. Given the deficiencies in the playing, it’s a bit hard to place Ozawa’s contribution. Certainly he deserves at least some of the blame for either not insisting that the orchestra perform idiomatically (and if you beat them up enough, they can do it), or for not having such a personally convincing alternative conception (as did Karajan in the Fifth Symphony) that it sets a different standard entirely. On the other hand, there’s little wrong with his pacing and sense of shape, and given an ensemble with some feel for the composer’s style, such as his own Boston Symphony, or the London Symphony, for example, the results might have been much better. Still, there’s no sense wasting time on what might have been. This one’s a loser.
