Sony Masterworks proudly presents a special remastered recording of Beethoven, conducted by the legendary George Szell. This remarkable 7-CD collection is housed in an elegant clamshell box and accompanied by an informative booklet.

Many facets of George Szell come together in this album: Although born in Budapest to a Hungarian Jewish family, he was a true Viennese musician, supremely talented and rudely arrogant. Beethoven was central to his repertoire – even more so than for most conductors. The Cleveland Orchestra was the pearl in Szell’s crown. Artur Rodzinski turned a mediocre group into a fine ensemble; Szell polished it to perfection. Donal Henahan of The New York Times called it “the world’s keenest symphonic instrument.” A decade after Szell’s death, Cleveland’s music director Christoph von Dohnanyi complained: “We give a great concert, and George Szell gets a great review.”

“When one listens to these nine Beethoven symphonies, one does not hear a wrong note, a smudged entrance, an ill-tuned moment, nor an awkward phrase.”

Szell felt that Columbia shortchanged Cleveland in favour of Ormandy’s Philadelphia Orchestra and Mitropoulos’s New York Philharmonic, which were making far more recordings. Part of the reason was Szell’s limited repertoire: the 18th and 19th-Century Austro-German classics, to which he admitted Dvořák. He never recorded a French symphony – not Berlioz, not Bizet, not Franck, not Saint-Saëns. He disliked 20th-Century music intensely (of a new Stravinsky score: “It is written in the post-Webernian small-fart-burp-belch-hiccup technique.”) and recorded very little of it. In Rodzinski’s time, the orchestra was about 80 players, meaning a half-sized string section.

Szell managed to boost it to 100 by the time of these recordings. They were enormously troubled seasons, with continuing battles among Szell, the musicians, their union (which ruled rather than supported them), management, and the board. None of that can be felt in these faultless performances.