Search - Mravinsky, Shostakovich, Oistrakh :: In Prague / Symphonies 5,6,11 & 12 / Violin Cto 1

One of the best Mravinsky collections -- but partly a fraud!

Santa Fe Listener | Santa Fe, NM USA | 03/11/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This box set represents some of the best recordings Mravinsky made of his staple repertoire while on tour to Prague with the Leningrad Phil. HIs discography is hopelessly jumbled, thanks to numerous duplications and reissues on a dozen labels. His classic Shotakovich Fifth, for example, has a dozen versions in the current catalog, yet they probably represent no more than four or five actual performances. The good news is that all the performances in this set stand at the top, and the sound form the Sixties is fair-to-middling FM stereo--these are live concerts. As every Mravinsky fan knows, there are horrendous-sounding recordings out there from Soviet sources, so finding consistenlty decent ones is welcome.



Even so, things get patchy quite often. The Shostakovich Violin Concerto #1 with Oistrakh comes in poor sound, which I put up with because Oistrakh never bettered this fiery and riveting account of a piece he more or less owned. Since this whole colleciton is out of print (and sells used for an absurdly high price) I won't go into detail about each CD except to say that each serves as a fine alternative to the Melodiya colleciton released by BMG, itself in variable sound deriving form live performances in Leningrad.



P.S. -- Hard as it is to believe, careful research has uncovered that Praga has committed a fraud here. They took Mravinsky's studio recordings from the Soviet Union of the Shostakovich 5th, 6th, 11th, and 12th, and passed them off as live recordings. To accomplish this deception, audience coughing and applause was overlaid on the original studio tapes. Bizarre."