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Mercury Living Presence Boxed Set CD21 van55
Antal Doráti / London Symphony Orchestra / Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra
Prokofiev: Scythian Suite - The Love of Three Oranges Suite - Symphony No.5

Prokofiev's "Scythian Suite" is one of those pieces from the early Twentieth Century that, like Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring," exploits contemporary fascination with the exotic and the primitive. It is full of jungle rhythms and eerie chord progressions in the strings. This old recording (1957), from the earliest days of stereo, captures all the excitement of the score. The London Symphony Orchestra's playing and Antal Dorati's interpretation of the score have never been equaled, let alone surpassed. You can play it on today's finest audio equipment and it will overwhelm you. 
Ditto with the Suite from "The Love for Three Oranges." People are perhaps more apt today to hear the entire opera, but the suite has its own, more concentrated charms. The famous "Marche" is done here as if it were being given its ultimate performance, but all the other movements are bestowed as close attention and as compelling a performance.
Slightly more problematic is the recording of the Fifth Symphony, which rounds out this CD. In the first place, the Fifth is much less reliant on bombast than the preceding suites, and so takes a different ear to appreciate it. The orchestra here is the Minneapolis Symphony. They frankly sound a bit anemic, a bit thin in places, though tempo, phrasing, dynamics, and structure are all well turned out. Some of the blame (if that's what you want to call it) may be laid on the Mercury staff, whose engineers sometimes tended to favor an honest reverb-free sound at the expense of an opulent one. But even here there's a pay-off. Toward the end of the final movement, you can hear ALL the detail in the most complex passages, and I, for one, never realized how downright interesting it all was!