Serge Koussevitzky - Beethoven: Symphonies No. 4 And 7 (1943/44) [2017]

Apart from one or two minor blemishes, Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony was accorded a beautiful performance - fleeting, precise and very expressive. Beethoven is one of the composers whom Mr. Koussevitzky performs with something of a super-super intensity and style. He makes the music “sing” all the way.

In view of such re-creative accomplishment, it is probably an invitation to be mobbed to suggest that the Fourth, no matter how fine its quality, is perhaps the least interesting, comparatively, of all the Beethoven nine symphonies.

This is not said casually; the First and Second are remarkable because of the departure they show from the formalism of the 18th Century; the Third, Fifth and Ninth are vast, dynamic masterpieces, and so, in its light-hearted way, is the Seventh. The “Pastoral” is unique, and the Eighth differs from all its fellows. But the Fourth? Call it one of the valleys rather than one of the peaks of Beethoven's genius.
C.W.D., Daily Boston Globe, 6 March 1943

Producer's Note
The reviewer in the Boston Globe, whilst just a little dismissive of Beethoven's Fourth Symphony, did at least praise the performance he'd heard a day before the present recording was made, thanks to a live radio broadcast from Boston's Symphony Hall. It may at the time have been a trifling matter; Koussevitzky was to conduct the Fourth a total of 39 times with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and this was its 33rd outing. Yet this recording is unique: the only surviving record of any performance given by Koussevitzky of this work, it has never been released until now.


Tracks:

BEETHOVEN
Symphony No. 4 - first ever release of a Koussevitzky Beethoven 4
Symphony No. 7 - previously unreleased

Personnel:

Boston Symphony Orchestra
conducted by Serge Koussevitzky