This justly famous recording is now ten years old but its clarity and attack are still, even in the age of digital and CD, quite sensational. I know of very few other versions, for example, in which such tiny but characteristic details as the off-beat cello pizzicatos at fig. 49 or the whooping tuba doubling the timpani just before fig. 60 are so immaculately . . . visible must be the word, I think. True, there are one or two moments that provide a clue as to how the trick was done. The solo cello (marked p) before fig. 91 is distinctly f, and so close that for a moment one imagines that Sir Georg is playing it himself (at another moment I could almost tell you which desk of the cello section is having a little trouble with a page-turn). But the sheer bite of the Chicago strings, the baying splendour of their brass section in full cry, above all the prodigious rhythmic drive of the performance put it among the very finest accounts of The Rite on record, and it looks set to retain that position for a while yet.
MEO