"The Milan orchestra plays Ravel's super-virtuoso arrangement of Mussorgsky's music with incredible facility and unbelievable intensity. While some might complain that the Italians' pungent winds and blasting brass sounds unidiomatic, they might be hard put to say exactly what would sound idiomatic in music written by a Russian and scored by a Frenchman to be played by an American orchestra…. The Rome orchestra plays Schumann's densely scored Second Symphony so that it sounds about as clean and direct as possible … with more lyricism and less heaviness…. Although Karajan is best known for his later recordings with the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics, as this disc shows, he was also fully capable of creating superb performances even with orchestras unfamiliar with his conducting."—All Music Guide