Victor de Sabata’s reputation is primarily that of a conductor who brought passion and exactitude to the theater. This is evident via his post-war live performances of Verdi’s Macbeth, Falstaff, and the Requiem, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, plus the classic 1953 EMI production of Puccini’s Tosca with Maria Callas in the title role. It’s harder to assess de Sabata’s prowess in the realm of orchestral music. He recorded relatively little compared to his contemporaries Hermann Scherchen, Karl Böhm, and Erich Kleiber, and his slender legacy leaves an erratic impression. This is particularly true for the present collection.
On one hand, de Sabata should be praised for recording items off the central repertoire’s beaten path, such as Glazunov’s From the Middle Ages suite or Mossolov’s noisy mini-tone poem Iron Foundry. On the other hand, the Turin orchestra clearly struggles, while the dry studio ambience and skewed balances hardly help matters. The textural lightness and finesse characterizing Erich Kleiber’s less-than-perfect Berlin recording of Stravinsky’s Fireworks make a stronger impression than de Sabata’s harder-driven account. The Turin musicians, however, rise to the occasion and play their conductor’s own Juventus as if it were a bona fide masterpiece rather than the 15 minutes of watered-down Repisghi it resembles.
Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, recorded 13 years later with the Rome Santa Cecillia Academy Orchestra, boasts higher standards of orchestral execution and engineering. Its generally swift tempos, elegant string phrasing, and zesty woodwinds evoke Toscanini’s similarly shaped BBC and NBC studio accounts. Mark Obert-Thorn’s transfers dig out plenty of body and detail from the original 78s, although he must contend with noisier pressings than those that Anthony Griffith used for a cleaner, slightly more vibrant remastering on a long-out-of-print World Record Club LP. The 1933 Turin sessions, though, are reproduced as well as they’ll ever be.
