This is the first recording to appear here with the Cleveland Orchestra playing under its new Music Director, and though you might have expected Decca to have taken on that new partnership, Telarc have done the job admirably with clean, bright sound matching a fresh, direct reading. The recording was made last October in Severance Hall, the orchestra's regular home, and the recording faithfully captures the atmosphere of a medium-size, fairly dry auditorium (which it is) with the engineers plainly relishing such moments as the exciting coda of the finale, where the horns are made to rasp almost too prominently.
Not that Marriner (Philips) is any less exciting at that culminating passage, and the interesting and unexpected point to note there and throughout both discs is that Marriner and the Academy sound bigger and weightier than Dohnanyi and the Cleveland. i suspect that the string forces used hardly differed at all, but if initially anyone thinks of the Marriner as being a chamber version, then in terms of sound that is hardly borne out. Marriner used his own band to produce a reading of fine detail and exceptional rhythmic vitality, and next to him Dohnanyi tends to sound rather plain, notably in the first movement, taken very fast indeed (with exposition repeat observed as in the Marriner). The Dohnanyi approach works rather better in the Funeral March, where his withdrawn manner coupled with the delicacy of the Cleveland pianissimo makes for a dark intensity at the start, while the final fragmented reprise of that main theme at the very end of the movement is even more darkly subdued than with Marriner. The C major episode in compound time is taken unusually fast, trotting along lightly to remind me of what, I believe, Bernard Shaw once said about the movement, that it reminded him of funerals in Dublin, where between the city limits and the cemetery the horses would be speeded up to a happy trot.
With Dohnanyi the Scherzo is again very fast and straight, beautifully played like the rest, but then in the finale the manner grows weightier. The main Allegro variations are clean and unrushed, the Adagio variations strong and swaggering at a speed markedly faster than Marriner's. I still prefer the Philips disc but Cleveland standards under Dohnanyi are well established on the new issue.'