Happening to be in the neighborhood, I let myself be enticed into DC's
Tower record store and found myself buying the three 2-CD sets of Toscanini
conducting the Beethoven Symphonies, the Egmont Overture, and the Missa
Solemnis remastered and selling for US$13.99 for each two-cd album.

I've started listining to them in sequence, appropriately impressed as I
listened, until I came upon his performance of Beethoven's Fourth (Carnegie
Hall broadcast 1951).  All of a sudden the grandeur of that symphony, so
often deemed overshadowed by the symphonies straddling it, hit me w/ the
proverbial blinding flash, the way no previous performance has done.  This
may be the first time I've heard that performance, but the symphony has
never before sounded so alive (the way the Karajan performance I have
on DG does not), so artless, each passage a seamless outgrowth of what
preceded it.  I've never found it easy to rank my preference of Beethoven's
Symphonies, an exercise that doesn't seem to have much point anyway unless
one is making desert island disk selections, but up to now, I had always
found it easy to eliminate the Fourth in the first cut.  This is no longer
true.

Walter Meyer