07. - 10. Bedrich Smetana - String Quartet No.1 in E minor 'From My Life' (orchestrated by George Szell) {30'30]
London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Geoffrey Simon
Chandos CHAN8412 (recorded February 1985; this CD release 1986)
(flac and scans)
Recording venue: All Saints' Church Tooting, London
Recording engineer: Ralph Couzens; Producer: Brian Couzens
Geoffrey Simon offers exuberant performances of the overture and dances from The Bartered Bride but the primary interest is in George Szell's excellent arrangement of Smetana's first quartet for full orchestra. I generally don't care for such orchestrations, with even Rudolf Barshai's arrangements of the Shostakovich quartets disappointing, but here the arrangement seems to work very well in this fine performance.
The great Hungarian-born conductor, George Szell, loved the work and made this arrangement in 1940. He subsequently recorded it with the Cleveland Orchestra for Columbia in 1949. This was reissued by Sony in the Masterworks Heritage series as a fill-up to the Dvorak Symphonies Nos. 7, 8 & 9 and can be found on the classicalmjourney.blogspot.com blog.
Strangely, Chandos has a completely different booklet for this disc on their website and I have included that, as well as the actual booklet with this disc, in this download. Presumably they had different booklets for different markets as the one with this disc is in English only.