Having already released Jascha Horenstein’s 1957 Baden-Baden recording of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony (PASC505) Pristine Audio have now decided to add the conductor’s broader 1953 account with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra to their sizeable catalogue. Back in the late 1960s while working for the BBC as a concerts management assistant I was fortunate enough to make the acquaintance of Deryck Cooke. Being in awe of Cooke’s Gramophone reviews I’d frequently waylay him for chats about (LP) records. One afternoon we hit upon the subject of Horenstein’s Eroica, which Cooke had a great fondness for, “but not the later version,” he insisted, continuing (and here I’m relying on memory), “in the earlier version you really notice how, towards the end of the first movement, he builds the music, layer upon layer, with everything audible – woodwinds especially – so that the peroration is truly overwhelming.” Needless to say, I rushed to my local (Hendon) library, ordered the Vox lp and on receiving it was suitably impressed. Things were just as Cooke suggested they would be. The playing of the VSO is dramatic in the extreme, the timpanist often cueing a thunderous roar above the rest of the orchestra, the deep-toned lower strings almost Furtwänglerian in their contribution to the ‘Funeral March’. According to Misha Horenstein, his cousin Jascha reportedly told an interviewer that “the first Eroica I conducted with my heart, the second with my head.” Only the start of the finale is rather effortful for an Allegro molto but otherwise this is a most memorable performance, more so than the coupling, a 1952 version of the Eighth with Orchestre National de France which though lively enough is interpretatively unmemorable. Good sound throughout.
Beethoven Eroica Jasch Horenstein
Pristine Audio PASC 589
robccowan 