This third volume of Eugene Ormandy conducting The Philadelphia Orchestra more than lives up to the standards of its predecessors - once again Obert-Thorn has done a superb job in transferring and cleaning up these 80+ year old recordings. It's a really superb set you'll not want to be without.
The double-CD album includes three major works: Brahms Symphony No. 2, Hindemith's Mathis der Maler Symphony, and Richard Strauss's Symphonia Domestica. The latter also supplies a set of waltzes drawn from Der Rosenkavalier and sets the tone for his namesake, Johann Strauss II, with three waltzes from the Viennese master. Finally we have two orchestral excerpts from Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.
As with Volume Two, the recordings date from the years 1937-1941, and once again Mark has drawn from them a sound quality of which Fanfare's reviewer wrote in 2019: "Mark Obert-Thorn’s remasterings here are little short of astounding; I could swear that some of these were early LP recordings from the late 1940s instead. No doubt the original fine sonics are as much a tribute to the velvety orchestral sound cultivated first by Stokowski and then Ormandy as to the quality of the original Victor shellacs..."