Review: Haitink's Variable Complete Concertgebouw Recordings 

Dave is just flexing now. Next we'll be seeing the complete combined Columbia, RCA, DG, Philips, Decca, Mercury, Telarc, Teldec, L'Oiseau-Lyre, Hungaraton, Supraphon, Melodiya Mega Massive Ginormous Box set stored inside a long long trailer made of two-inch thick-cardboard with an insert booklet the size of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that has to be hauled with a towing cable attached to a big rig.

Yes, Herman Krebbers was a great violinist!!

Mine just arrived minutes ago. I'm looking forward to it. A good friend of mine and I saw him conduct Bruckner's 4th Symphony with the CSO. That was a great concert.

Hits & misses accepted, I'm glad to see this box available. I'm not going to get it, but happy to see a well done/ thought out tribute done for Haitink 👍

One of my great experiences in music was hearing Gotterdammerung under Haitink's baton at Covent Garden. Just a wonderful memory and Anne Evans was magnificent. She certainly didn't have a voice like Flagstad but she achieved great clarity and focus, maximizing what she had.

The Concertgebouw has an organ and a fine one indeed! (Te Deum Bruckner)

OMG, this is a difficult review. I think David is mostly right, but yeah: when i discovered classical music when i were 16-17 I just bough recordings of Von Karajan. Who else? But then I found out that as a Dutch kid living in the countryside my country has a great orchestra and conductor as well: the concertgebouw and Haitink. He went my 'hero' before I ever heard a recording of him and heard the orchestra. In 1985 i went as 20yo guy to my first Haitink concert: the Sjostakovitsj 1st violin concerto (with concert master Viktor Liberman) and Bruckner 3. Since then I heard Haitink live around 100 times. (I was in the audience at his last Christmas Matinee in 1987 with Mahlers 9th). Lot to say about Davids reviews, but one thing: yes, Haitinks Beethoven is dull, but not his Concertgebouw Pastorale! It is still my favorite Pastorale. Which conductor did the second movement better? So laizy, so sleepy, so beautifully played? Karajan? Harnoncourt? No. Whoever? You can throw away all Haitinks Beethoven symphonies, bot not his CG Pastorale (just the 2nd movement). Important: we Dutch are a small country, not importatnt at all, and then we have that gorgeous orchestra which (as David says) Haitink maintained very good. Or: finished the job Van Beinium was not allowed to do...

I have most of this stuff on LP, which is why I am having difficulty deciding whether to get the box. For me, there is enough that is worthwhile (LVB concertos, Brahms serenades, Bruckner, Mahler, Shostakovich, and Tchaikovksy, along with the really beautiful Bizet, Debussey and Ravel), that I might bite the bullet and do it. I don't think it is possible to overstate how great Krebbers was in the Beethoven and Brahms concertos along with Ein Heldenleben. Haitink's LSO Beethoven cycle is among my favorites, and I really don't care whether it is the result of the conductor's idea or not. It is full of verve and beautifully played and recorded. One other note: just before the digital era, the Congertgebouw made some remarkably well interpreted, played, and recordings albums with other conductors: Kondrashin's Scheherazade is my favorite, and Colin Davis' Dvorak, Haydn and Stravinsky are really wonderful.

Another Dave Big-box Review - Yay ! I'm never ever gonna buy this but this video is a total joy nonetheless. Huzzah !

The Gramophones review (July 2023) is similar to yours but does praise Haitink’s Haydn (symphonies 96 and 99) Perhaps the only Haydn in his discography-yet the review also quoted him saying Haydn is so underrated and also complaining “ am I to spend my life playing what every other conductor plays?” So somewhat mysterious that his repertoire is so middle of the road

Hermann Prey!!! Thank God there are recordings of him singing with Haitink and the Concertgebouw, because I was only a child then 🙂 Sorry guys, about the bad Boston recordings!

The Perahia Beethoven recordings were on CBS, right? The amount of licensing for this set is interesting. All the EMI licensing implies that EMI isn't planning their own Haitink mega-box.

I grew up with his recordings ever since hearing an LP of him conducting Peter And The Wolf as well as Britten's 'A Young Person's Guide To The Orchestra' and regard him as somewhat of a personal hero of mine. Never gave it a lot of thought but I always gravitated towards other conductors for Beethoven, like Karl Böhm and George Czell. It's funny that you actually seem to validate what my instinct already told me - so it wasn't just me, haha. I have his Bruckner and Mahler symphony cycles on LP box set, some of the best recordings I know. Unfortunately he never recorded the 1873 original version of the 3rd with the Wagner quotations still included, so I have to supplement it with a live recording conducted by Hans Zender. Might not be as good of a performance but at least it's the best version of that work IMHO.

Wasn’t the other Beethoven Piano Concerto series with Brendel? Didn’t know he did one with Arrau - I thought Arrau did cycles with Galliera and Davis, no?

Dave mentions that the set doesn't have some recordings, specifically the Planets. That was one of my first purchases - on cassette. I very much liked it, but it never garnered much praise. Years later one of the British record mags did a series of blind listenings for various pieces, and for the Planets, Haitink came out #1, to the reviewers' surprise. (Blind listernings are the way to go anyway, IMO.)

His was my first Beethoven's ninth a hundred years ago and at the time I thought it was faaaabulous. After many B9's later, I find it unlistenable for exactly the reasons you mention. I don't know if the performance or the sound is worst.

Much as I admire Haitink, he was as you point out quite often prone to firing on less than full cylinders, and so on this occasion I won't be buying this set. As it happens, I already have the individual Bruckner, Mahler and Tchaikovsky symphony cycle sets, plus a number of others including the Strauss series (Ein Heldenleben is fantastic - one of the very best by anyone), Rachmaninov piano concertos and the exquisite Debussy orchestral works. It's sensible that Decca have included the LPO Shostakovich symphonies to make the cycle complete, but it does beg the question of what will happen when a possible/probable LPO box is released? Are they going to repeat the process by including the Concertgebouw Shostakovich recordings to make the cycle complete all over again? We'll see. In the meantime I shall save my not limitless funds and wait for the Klemperer/Warner and (promised) Fricsay/DG boxes to appear - I can't wait for those!

I agree with you on Herman Krebbers as the wonderful Beethoven soloist. Part of my pride in that is that, although I did nothing to achieve this 😉, he came from the small town of Hengelo, close to the German border, and that's where I grew up. [insert national anthem here 👈🏻]

Dave-Daniel Barenboim left as Music Director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2006. Ricardo Muti became the Music Director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2010. Bernard Haitink was the Interim Music Director{or Chief Director} of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 2006-2010, Did Haitink make any recordings with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at that time period?

My feeling on original jackets in these comprehensive boxes is: if you're going to do it, go all the way with it; otherwise, just have generic covers with maximum timings. My main criticism with the Sony boxes, as wonderful as they are, is that you get some original covers but not all, with various other works from other LPs used as filler, which makes finding some of the contents of these other LPs unnecessarily difficult without consulting the book.

That second Shostakovich 15th you mentioned, is that the RCO Live recording?

This is very similar to other big conductor boxes - whether it’s Karajan, Muti or Solti- lots of hits as well as misses. enough hits I would think to get the box if you have the cash and don’t have replicates.

I cant get over the fact that the Dutch word for Christmas Matinee, 'Kerstmatinee', in English sounds like 'Cursed Matinee' 😂

It's refreshing to know that someone else seems to share my taste (at least some of it). While I truly love the Concertgebouw, I have no enthusiasm for Haitink. I have only a few of his recordings, the Debussy, Ravel, and the Mahler Christmas Matinees. Throroughly disliked his LPO Schererazade, though. So I don't share all Dave's taste.

Something about this review gives me the idea that David likes the orchestra better than Haitink. I don't know, just a hunch 😉

To “wallop everything onto 82-minute CDs,” wouldn’t that require new mastering and therefore more upfront cost?

I always found him and his recordings rather dull. I heard him conduct the Mahler 3 at the Proms, the St-Saens Organ Symphony, and the Bruckner 9 in and with the Concertgebouw on his 65th birthday. Even the last event was rather underwhelming, sadly. However, there is an inspired Brahms 4 with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe at the Proms on RU-vid which shows of what he was capable. A nice man, modest and self-effacing, and he kept the Concertgebouw Orchestra in the splendid shape in which he inherited from the great Eduard van Beinum. He will be missed.

Who's gonna buy these boxes? Beautifully packaged, of course. If you are a Haitink and/or Concertgebouworkest fan then the chances are you have a lot of this stuff. Duplicating stuff annoys me, but with so many boxes/download packages, it is unavoidable.

George Carlin once did an ad touting a package that included every sound recording ever made. The Milwaukee dial tone? Included! We’re getting close.

Regarding the Concertgebow orchestra. I always thought their brass section a little weak in, the works that matter. For example, Bruckner, Berlioz. I heard a recording of Symphonie Fantastique by Colin Davis, and the brass sounded like they off stage somewhere..