Most people, if asked when they thought stereo recording first appeared, would probably say the early 1950s. In fact, as the informative booklet note for the Beethoven here makes plain, Bell Laboratories recorded Stokowski in some Scriabin, Mussorgsky and Wagner in 1931-2 (released half a century later on LP—nla), and Columbia in London made a recording by Beecham of Mozart's Jupiter Symphony (never released, unfortunately) in 1933. The German radio was the first to make successful dual-channel tapes employing Magnetophon technology, and the present performance of the Emperor Concerto made in Berlin in 1944 (anti-aircraft guns can be heard in the distance during the first-movement cadenza) is claimed to be the earliest complete stereo tape in existence. There is, as RO noted in his review of the LP issue, little in the way of directional placing in the stereo image, but the actual sound is vivid (the orchestra somewhat overbright and 'toppy', and nothing recessed about the piano, as RO found, nor is hiss obtrusive unless the general level is raised unnaturally high), and the orchestral playing excellent.
Gieseking gives a rather unusual reading, going for brilliance and sparkle rather than grandiosity in the opening, and showing great delicacy in the runs and passagework: his Adagio is relaxed and deeply contemplative. There is one jarring moment when the cadenza kicks off at a slightly lower pitch than the preceding section. An interesting issue then, and some fine playing, but 36 minutes is an ungenerous allocation of time for a Compact Disc.
For the Pearl disc one has to accept a high level of surface noise persisting from the original 78s (to have eradicated this would presumably have meant sacrificing some of Gieseking's wonderfully subtle tonal nuances), but this well-filled CD offers a wealth of delights a beautifully atmospheric ''Vallee des cloches'', a fluid ''Pagodes'' with the most delicate of pianissimos, an ''Ondine'' (Gaspard) awe-inspiring in its finger control, a tender ''Fille aux cheveux de lin'', an impudent ''Danse de Puck'' and a ''Serenade interrompue'' superior to the one in Gieseking's 1953 EMI recording (4/88). As compared to that later set of the Preludes, the pre-war performances are mostly slightly faster (especially ''Des pas sur la neige''), dynamics are generally more faithfully observed (e.g. in ''Les collines d'Anacapri'') though the storms of ''Ce qu'a vu le vent d'ouest'' still start to erupt too soon. The two last-mentioned Preludes (as well as Ravel's ''Scarbo'' from Gaspard) contain some untidy splashes which suggest that Gieseking's vaunt of never practising may not have been such a good idea!'