Dimitri Mitropoulos conducts Schumann’s “Spring” Symphony, recorded live at the 1957 Salzburg Festival, with a buoyant energy and joyful spirit that pre-echoes Bernstein’s Vienna recording from 28 years later. The first movement has impetuous drive, while the finale exhibits such a fluidity of tempo it seems almost as if Mitropoulos were playing the orchestra like a piano. The only fly in the ointment is the Vienna strings’ inability to maintain intonation in Schumann’s rapid figurations at the conductor’s urgent pace.
Those intonation problems migrate from the strings to the winds for the Sinfonia Domestica, yet Mitropolous has the orchestra playing with infectious excitement and aliveness, qualities it displayed to a noticeably lesser degree in Lorin Maazel’s live 1980s recording for DG. Mitropoulos projects Strauss’ illustrations of domestic banality with unerring fidelity, and he really whoops it up (listen to those rollicking horns!) for the zany, cartoonish finale. The mono recording is low-level and really needs to be played at high volume to have any impact. But the real problem is that Orfeo has allotted only one track to the entire 43-minute work–no easy access here! Regardless, it’s performances such as this one (and the same conductor’s stunning Tchaikovsky Pathétique on CBS) that make you wish Mitropoulos had lived long enough to record more of his interpretations in stereo. [10/10/2002]
