George Szell Conducts Beethoven Symphonies 1-9 & Overtures 7CDs Box Set

Release Date December 13, 2024

7-CD Box Set Edition

GEORGE SZELL

BEETHOVEN

GEORGE SZELL CONDUCTS THE BEETHOVEN SYMPHONIES AND OVERTURES

REMASTERED STEREO RECORDINGS

The collection, featuring remasters previously only available in George Szell - The Complete Columbia Album Collection, includes Szell's legendary Beethoven symphonies and overtures cycle in a specially priced collection

So many facets of George Szell coalesce in this album: though born in Budapest into a Hungarian-Jewish family, he was a true Viennese musician, supremely talented, rudely arrogant. Beethoven was central to his repertoire, even more so than for most conductors. The Cleveland Orchestra was Szell’s crown jewel. Artur Rodzinski built a mediocre group into an excellent ensemble; Szell polished it to perfection. Donal Henahan of The New York Times called it “the most highly tuned symphonic instrument in the world.” A decade after Szell’s death, Cleveland Music Director Christoph von Dohnanyi complained, “We give a great concert, and George Szell gets a great review.”
Some skeptics have complained that Szell’s performances were too fast, too hard-edged, lacking warmth; his response was, “I cannot put chocolate sauce on asparagus.” Rigorous as few were, he was neither a genial Bruno Walter nor a carefree Charles Munch. Szell’s interpretations matched Toscanini’s in precision and correctness, but lacked that master’s singing strings. Some Cleveland musicians claimed the orchestra was even better in rehearsal, that they often sounded “over-rehearsed” or “tight” in concert. Szell’s performances were not always a success; a January 1959 Beethoven Eight was criticized for “the astonishing number of ragged entrances” (Frank Hruby in the Cleveland Free Press). Any problems always seemed to resolve themselves in recording sessions, however; this 1961 Beethoven Eight is perfection, my favorite performance of all. Listening to these nine Beethoven symphonies, one hears not one wrong note, not one smudged entrance, not one out-of-tune moment, not one clumsy phrase.
Severance Hall, home to The Cleveland Orchestra since 1931, suffered from overly dry acoustics, the last thing a Szell performance needed. The earliest of these recordings, the 1957 “Eroica,” was recorded in Cleveland’s Masonic Temple, a 2,200-seat auditorium where the orchestra performed from 1921-1930. Major acoustic renovations, including the installation of what became known as the Szell Shell, took place in the summer of 1958. They were successful, so the remaining symphonies were recorded in the renovated Severance Hall, from 1959-1964; four overtures (Egmont, Coriolan, King Stephen and Leonore No. 2) were recorded there in 1966, Fidelio and Leonore No. 1 at EMI’s St. John’s Wood Studios, London, in 1967.
Epic Records, a CBS label was founded in 1953, to disseminate music that “did not fit the theme of its more dominant Columbia label” (Wikipedia). Cleveland didn’t fit because there was no room for it; Columbia already had the Philadelphia Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Pittsburgh Symphony, and many smaller orchestras producing recordings for its main label. Cleveland became Epic’s flagship orchestra. The Beethoven Symphonies and Leonore Overture No. 3 were released on Epic LPs; the other six overtures, on Columbia.
Szell felt that Columbia had sidelined Cleveland in favor of Ormandy’s Philadelphia Orchestra and Mitropoulos’s New York Philharmonic, who were making many more recordings. Part of the reason was Szell’s limited repertoire: the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Austro-German classics, to which he admitted Dvořák. He never recorded a French symphony: no Berlioz, Bizet, Franck, or Saint-Saëns. He deeply disliked twentieth-century music (of a new Stravinsky score: “It’s written in the post-Webern technique of bodily noises”) and recorded very little.
Money was always tight in Cleveland, and the musicians were grossly underpaid. In Rodzinski’s day, the orchestra had about 80 musicians – i.e., a medium-sized string section. Szell managed to raise that to 100 by the time of these recordings. They were enormously problematic seasons, with continuous battles between Szell, the musicians, their union (which rode them rather than supporting them), management, and the board. None of that is apparent in these flawless performances.