Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The controversey about Toscanini just will not go away, nor is it likely to abate anytime soon. Contemporary music critics ran out of superlatives in their reviews of Toscanini's performances, and found his style so convincing and powerful they soon referred to him as THE Maestro, as if there were no others. Indeed, Toscanini had few peers during his long, outstanding career. This is somewhat harder to discern for modern listeners, who have been brought up listening to two generations of conductors who have mostly all been heavily influenced by Toscanini and the revolution in interpretation and performance he wrought. Two myths about Toscaninini persist: the first, by his supporters, that he was a literally faithful interpreter; the second, by his critics, that he conducted everything too fast. Neither of these myths is exactly true, but there is little point in refuting them in detail here. The current take on Toscanini is that his recorded legacy does not support his reputation, since it consists mostly of recordings from when the maestro was already well into his 70's and 80's and had lost his creative spark. Peter Guttmann notes that by this time, Toscanini tended to regard all music as an abstraction and tended to seek maximum efficiency in performance, rather than inspired interpretaion. Very well, if that is so, it works remarkable WONDERS on Beethoven. The first remarkable quality of any Toscanini performance is its rythymic DRIVE. This led his critics to charge that Toscanini took things too fast. What he really did was to seek what he considered to be a CORRECT tempo in every movement, one which he could inflect or adjust subtly as needed, rather than alter radically, as many other conductors did, and do to this day. This gives the music an unmatched sense of flow, and forward propulsion which serves the purpose of Beethoven remarkably well. These performances are always going somewhere, and getting there with a purpose you can feel. One suspects that Beethoven would approve. The other quality that sets Toscanini apart is his remarkable clarity of line, both horizontal (melody) and vertical (harmony). This again sets up a flow to the music, a sense that every phrase flows inevitably from the one preceeding it and inevitably into the next one, that few other conductors can sustain for an entire performance. Toscanini's painstaking adjustments of orchestral balances and colors are legendary. Nowhere is that more evident than in the recording of the 7th Symphony in this set. Although the sound is only hi-fi mono, you hear the separation and definition of the orchestral sections BETTER than you do on most subsequent stereo recordings by other conductors. Nothing gets lost or assimilated in the tuttis, you hear EVERYTHING. Finally, these are among the most DURABLE performances of these symphonies you are likely to hear. Others may contain more romance, poetry or passion, but these shine as well as they did when they were recorded half a century ago, and repeated listenings do not dim their lustre or bore you with familiarity. Toscanini's genius was to have faith in the genius of Beethoven. He knew that if you played these scores judiciously, with taste and absolute commitment, that the genius of Beethoven would emerge in full radiance, and dazzle the listener all by itself.