Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881)
Pictures at an Exhibition (1874, orch. Ravel,1922)
Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)
Symphonie fantastique (1830)
National Philharmonic Orchestra (Mussorgsky), London Symphony Orchestra (Berlioz)/Carlos Païta
rec. November 1977 (Berlioz), September 1981 (Mussorgsky), Kingsway Hall, London, UK
Le Palais des Dégustateurs PDD039 [79]

The series of releases on the Le Palais des Dégustateurs label showcasing the work of Carlos Païta is something of a trip down memory lane. Païta, a rather maverick conductor, founded his own record label Lodia via the financial support of a group of Swiss patrons and so promoted his work. Mainly London orchestras were engaged to record core Romantic repertoire. By embracing early digital techniques, some of these discs received attention and often praise; the Symphonie fantastique offered here and an early A Wagner Festival on Decca earned Grand Prix du Disque awards. Certainly I remember them offered as ‘premium’ LPs with an aura of hi-fidelity recording and deluxe production. So, I was curious to revisit these some forty years later to see how posterity would view them.

This generous disc opens with the 1981 Kingsway Hall digital recording of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition inRavel’s orchestration, played by the National Philharmonic Orchestra. This makes it a very early digital recording, certainly for a small label. As an orchestral showpiece, this is an ideal work to show how digital recording can handle wide dynamics, fast transients and complex large orchestral scores. The National Philharmonic was a famously skilled pick-up orchestra, a good choice to perform this virtuoso work. The question must be whether Païta brings much to the table as an interpreter.

Listening to a series of Païta performances clearly reveals a particular interpretative temperament. He is not that interested in attempting idiomatic readings, or those particularly faithful to the letter of the score. More often, he prefers a kind of expressive volatility which leads to fairly extreme tempi with fallible ensemble – that is due to a lack of technical clarity from the podium or not enough session time for another take. As a recording, this is better than I thought/remembered it to be. There is a brightness to the upper strings and a certain lack of deep bass. Overall, however, the soundstage is clear and wide even if the loudest climaxes do not expand as effortlessly as the finest versions can achieve. The climax to The Great Gate of Kiev flattens and hardens. Interpretatively, this is perfectly respectable without any great insights. It feels like what it probably was: a decent read-through by very good players.

If early digital versions of this work are your thing, then Georg Solti’s 1980 Decca/Chicago version and Eduardo Mata’s in Dallas on RCA easily surpass Païta’s performance – to name but two at random. And let us not forgett the famous Maazel/Cleveland 1978 performance on Telarc. Indeed, Solti’s performance shows just how good early digital recording could be: Decca engineers provide enduringly exciting and impressive results nearly half a century (!) after the event.

The coupling, Berlioz’s ever-remarkable Symphonie fantastique,is generous yet contentious. As noted, in some circles this was a feted performance; on first release, it earned Païta his second Grand Prix du Disque. Other contemporary critics were less enthused. There is an interesting, quite extensive article “The curious case of Carlos Païta” on the Art Music Lounge website from December 2023. The author gives a good overview of Païta’s life and career, and covers the critical reception/controversy of his recordings, and this Symphonie fantastique features in it. The London Symphony was again recorded, in analogue, at the Kingsway Hall. (That was November 1977, not 1978 as the liner cover says. The gatefold LP was released in 1978.)

The award-winning stature of this performance piques the interest if only to see what the fuss was about. The writer of that article makes a valid point: in the late 1970s, Colin Davis’s recordings of this work on Phillips – in 1964 with the LSO and with the Concertgebouw a decade later – were considered the “library choices”. They were the reference versions against which all others should be measured. Païta’s approach is about as different from Davis’s as it is possible to imagine. No problem with that as such, but this version is borderline crude.

Païta’s early recordings for Decca were on their Phase 4 label. The concept was to exploit early domestic stereo systems with engineering that specifically highlighted dynamic range and stereo spread. Subtle it was not; in Païta’s Symphonie,it finds the musical equivalent. I am not sure I have ever heard a recording that makes the Kingsway Hall sound less acoustically sympathetic. One can argue that this work is literally Berlioz’s fever-dream. So, it might well be symptomatically accurate to play with restless, even aggressive energy, with manic outbursts and without any kind of tenderness or relaxation. As a listening experience, it is both unrelenting and exhausting.

Direct comparison of timings with the Davis/Concertgebouw recording show Païta quicker in every movement – although unlike Davis he also does not take repeats. The 4^th movement Marche au supplice is more of a jog to the scaffold,  4:07 compared to Davis’s 6:48. Total timings come in at 48:03 compared to 55:40. But it is so much more than just shorter time frames. There is an impatience and lack of warmth, so that even the pastoral reveries of the third movement are oddly literal. The swirling waltz of Un bal seems more likely to cause vertigo than delight. This just sounds angry and aggressive throughout – an odd embodiment of machismo as music. Credit, though, to the LSO for playing with the virtuosity that they do, although the garish engineering does them few favours. The briefest summary of this performance and recording is coarse, and that makes its award-winning status all the more baffling.

The website of Le Palais des Dégustateurs is offering this recording (at Easter 2026) at around €21 for CD and €10 for download. In performance and recording terms alone, this struggles to warrant such a premium price for the compact disc version. The documentation accompanying the disc is curious, to say the least. An extensive French and English liner note describes (and links) the music in rather flowery terms but there is not a single word about the recording – its historical value and the like – or even about Carlos Païta. Surely, the main if not only reason for interest in this disc of such standard fare should be the conductor. Neither is there any technical information about the remastering, the original source or the original engineering and production team.

I checked a random selection of streaming platforms. Presto, Spotify and Qobuz UK all have the earlier iterations of Païta’s Lodia catalogue but not these new incarnations. Yet I do not know if there has been any change/improvement in this latest version. My distant memory of a Chrome Cassette version of the Pictures was more positive than this encounter revealed, whilst the Berlioz was a first – and last – time for this waking nightmare.

Nick Barnard