<i> Cheap</i> Means <i> Quality</i> in Beethoven CDs

Today’s classical recording industry renders nonsensical that hallowed bromide “you get what you pay for.” Nowadays, cheap is a virtual guarantee of quality, applying to reissues of material dating back 20 years and ore--recordings that, unlike today’s, do not involve costly technology and inflated artists’ fees or royalties. And often, we are in the presence of names that have taken on the aspect of legend, though not always deservedly, to be sure.

Examples of some of yesterday’s best are several recent Beethoven reissues, sold at “mid-price”--that is, about $10 per CD--or even “budget,” which in major retail outlets translates to between $5 and $7.

It would be difficult to find better value for the money, or more durable performances at any price, than the Beethoven symphonies recorded by the Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell for CBS in the early 1960s. Their re-release in Sony’s budget “Essential Classics” series nears completion with the appearance of the Second and Fifth symphonies (47651) and the First and Sixth, the “Pastoral” (46532).

For first-time buyers, the advantages of major performances at these prices are obvious. For veterans, there are the abiding pleasures of Szell’s clean, dashing interpretations and the surprise (for those with neither the time nor inclination to keep revisiting the past) of the conductor’s rarely acknowledged feeling for the lyric line, as in the mobile, delicate “Scene by the Brook” from the “Pastoral.”

There’s more prime Beethoven from Szell and the Clevelanders in an equally inexpensive pairing of the First and Third Piano Concertos (Sony 47658), with pianist Leon Fleisher as the crisply efficient soloist--which is intended not as a put-down but to signal Fleisher’s keen projection of the difference between the early Beethoven of these concertos and deeper, darker, later Beethoven.

The often-cited similarity between Szell’s spare, objective way with Beethoven and that of his onetime idol Arturo Toscanini (also the idol of Erich Kleiber, Reiner, Klemperer, Karajan--for that matter, nearly anyone who lifted a baton between the two world wars) can be reappraised in the latest of RCA Victor’s unabating stream of reissues of that controversial Italian conductor’s latter-years recordings.

But there’s the rub: latter-years . Toscanini, in the final decade-plus of his reign as maestro of the NBC Symphony, seemed willfully to exacerbate his image as the anti-Romantic, unfeeling speed demon. Szell was never this rushed, nor was Toscanini at the time his junior colleagues were having their musical perceptions changed by his example.

Thus, in Toscanini’s 1945 recording of Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto, with Ania Dorfmann a perfect windup collaborator--bang-on accurate, even at the boss’s manic tempos, and perhaps unavoidably inexpressive--little of the composer’s joyous inspiration emerges.

In its companion (on RCA Victor 60267, mid-price), the much darker Fourth Concerto, Toscanini has to partner a pianist with a will of his own, Rudolf Serkin.

It’s an unsettled performance but not, as is that of the First Concerto, an angry one. Here, pianist and conductor take turns being dominant. The tension, resolved in a splendid if blisteringly paced finale, is hugely exciting rather than destructive.

An even younger Serkin, unrecognizable as the somber, granitic icon of the 1960s and later (he died last year, at age 88), is heard in a valuable two-disc compilation of his earliest recordings, made between 1929 and 1938, most in conjunction with his father-in-law, violinist Adolf Busch (EMI 54374, mid-price).

The Beethoven segments are a thunderous yet richly colored “Appassionata” Sonata from 1936 and Serkin’s marvelously propulsive contribution to the Sonata in E-flat, Opus 12, No. 3 (1931), with Busch’s clipped, spartan phrases like slaps in the face of the then-prevalent throbbing-lushness school of Romantic violin playing.

The set, which revives a dozen Serkin recordings in all, further contains one of the great pre-World War II (1938) Mozart piano concerto recordings, that of the work in E-flat, K. 449.

The pianist and Busch, directing his Chamber Players, here created an interpretation that was a major contribution to eradicating the image of Mozart as a Romantic precursor (and therefore a not-quite-”complete” composer), or, worse, the fragile porcelain figurine suggested by the playing of such nominal specialists of the time as Walter Gieseking and Solomon.