Classical Corner Classical Music Corner (thread #39)

Pity. . . . Clearly, fame isn't everything, is it . . . Mr. Potter?

Played Friedrich Gulda's performance of Beethoven's #28, op. 101, A maj. this morning. My first impulse was to back up on the march and play it over again—it didn't seem to 'scan' rhythmically for me, being much slower and dynamically reserved than others. I did, turning up the amp just a notch, and heard a slower pulse under [and in a way, tugging against] the predominate pulse of the march. Canna say I heard that before, though my mutant Maggie/a/d/s/ system does draw the left-hand voices out so you can feel them. He does something similar in the slow intro to the fugue which begs the question—how's his Well-Tempered Klavier?

One of the things that draws me into this piece of music is how the finale sets off as if it's about to make this grand rhetorical statement and then catches itself in mid-sentence as if to say, "now wait a minute." Gulda draws out that little bit of business just so, as Robert Mitchum would put it. The Subject eventually gets around to being a "Real Fugue", at which point LvB creates the template for his 'Late Period' fugues—early harbingers of early 20th century experiments in deliberate dissonance and a pianistic challenge that continues on through Lizst, Colon Nancarrow and Cecil Taylor.

Gulda's rendition of the fugue is the cleanest, most fluent organization of these notes I've heard so far, he gets at least 50 points for Gryffindor on account of that, and that will go a long way in the finals. However, we have to dock team Polydor™ [a wholly owned subsidiary of Slytherin ltd.] 50 points for having only two tracks, one for each sonata, thus the inability to move directly to the second movement of op. 101.

I'm saving the Hammerklavier for later. I want to play it loud.

 

I 've asked the same question before in a previous Classical Corner thread, but it was long ago, and now I cannot locate the answer that a forum member kindly provided.
So here it goes again.

Concerning the Everest vinyl, which are the ones that sound best, otherwise what should I look for when I pick up an Everest record? There are many different variations, anyone can share some light on the different pressings?

 

I'm gonna take a crack at this—earliest is usually best, here's a chart with label designs and dates of use of those designs.

http://www.vinylbeat.com/cgi-bin/labelfocus.cgi?label=EVEREST&label_section=D,E,F

This is the earliest:



These are usually toxic:


Also, there are some audio boutique pressings floating about—

http://www.stereomojo.com/Stereomojo Music Reviews/StereomojoMusicReviewsLPs2.htm

No doubt the "Classic" reissues are what you are looking for.

 

I found it boring.

His Chopin Ballades are the model of technical brilliance, but nothing else I have heard from him came anywhere near the achivement of his Amadeo/Brilliant/Decca Eloquence Beethoven sonata set.

In the Brilliant set (same sound as the Amadeo, I've heard both) they separate all the tracks. very strange that they didn't on the Amadeo.

 

What's the best/cheapest way to get Gulda's Amadeo set of the sonatas right now?

 

On Decca Eloquence ($28.57):

http://www.amazon.com/Beethoven-Pia...4263889&sr=8-1&keywords=Decca+Gulda+Beethoven

you get the concertos too!

 

I can remember back to a time when I heard one radio announcer refer to the geniune Melodiya vinyl pressings from Russia as "pressed in the finest street metal and bitumen, they could find "
I always only brought the Melodiya's I had on vinyl, in their EMI re-issues.
Today I gasp at the asked normal price for Melodiya CDs, considering - I once brought a large batch of them, CD pressed by a local firm Disctonics, cleared out for for $3.99 each. Having on hand, a 'genuine' Melodiya - Miaskovsky CD to compare with a Disctonics edition of the same performance - I noted, both CDs did have the same label etched matrix numbers.

 

Jury duty concert

After all the introductory info, plugged my Sennheiser semi-noise-blocking earbuds into my iPhone, and listened to Grumiaux playing 2 Mozart concertos and Ashkenazy playing Schubert's D 894.

Kept track of my e-mail, and tried to do a little paperwork.

What a great way to spend the morning.

 

What I also found staggering is reports that Rachmaninoff in New York. gladly used to go to see Florence Foster Jenkins publicly perform. That now immortal CD on RCA of Ms Jenkins 'operatic soprano vocal performances' is culture's seriously intended -inadvertant laugh fest of all time with things : like Mozart Magic Flute's Queen of Night arias and Gounod's Jewel Song from Faust Citizen Kane's own operatic creature Susan , had nothing on Jenkins!!!

 

His Mozart violin sonatas with Haskil are absolutely lovely. He's one of, if not my most, favorite violinists.

 

Irrational Exuberance

Well, Ms. Alexander did have a certain despairing affect entirely absent in the Divine Ms. Jenkins' performances.

 

Cool, many thanks, Robin, that's what I was looking for! So now I realize that out of the 20 or so Everest records that I own not a single one is 1A or 1B. No wonder why they sound like crap!

 

32-41 this afternoon.

 

The first four bars of Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C sharp minor played for 2 hours

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/06/b...-craig-brown.html?_r=2&pagewanted=2&ref=books

“Well, does this mean I return the sandwich?”

 

Just checked 5 randomly chosen Melodiya CD's from my collection, and none of them has that blurb or any mentioning of noise reduction use whatsoever (I thoroughly checked the booklets too), although it hardly means anything. There's info about the original recording engineer, the mastering engineer and the editor though. Also, these CD's were issued between 1995 and 2005. Of course, the recordings are much older (the oldest one by Mravinsky is from 1948, the newest one by Temirkanov is from 1983). There's definitely some hiss left, although I was forced to listen at volume a bit higher than normal to digest it (I used my Audio-Technica ATH-M50 cans for this). The "as close to the first note as possible" kind of editing combined with mostly "loud" openings, as well as constant background noises on live recordings didn't help either. Overall, the quality varied from acceptable (but better than many recordings from, say, the Brilliant Russian Archives series) to pretty good (those with more close miking - I really love the Debussy/Bartok/Stravinsky CD, the timpani rock there).

 

I right click the upper margin of the new thread and 'create shortcut' on my desktop.

 

Just came across Robin's question in the previous thread:

IMO, Kleiber's rendition is uniformly good and powerful but... a bit foursquare and predictable in the repeats for my taste. So, I didn't bother with finding the SACD for cheap since I'd got the CD for uber-cheap.

Thus my current favorite is this performance, which, accidentally, is on a hybrid SACD (I got it as a part of the complete set). It needs to be heard not only for its vitality and unobtrusive and intelligent power but also for a really huge definition/dynamics gap between the red-book and the stereo SACD layer (I'm a stereo guy). This gap almost scared me (and my friend who was helping me to do the comparison) when I switched between the layers for the first time. Strongly recommended! (BTW, as well as the complete set!)

 

Haitink? Really?

 

Thanks, John, that's a good advice, but usually I read the forum on my ipad using tapatalk, you can subscribe to the thread if you want, but it's easier if you post something. This way you always have it available among your participated threads.

 

Mamma mia (bug of the year)

While rearranging CD's on my table (they form an improvised "stack" which mostly represents my current play-list) I suddenly noticed... a weird resemblance between two box sets. And IMMEDIATELY recalled a "recommendation" I recently made.

OK, guys, I'm sorry to report that these boxes indeed look almost the same but the "musics" hardly sound the same at all. Thus my recommendation for "the Scriabin concertos", slightly corrected by a bit less heavy weather (but it's still very hot there, even after a thunderstorm and even at 4 A.M.), remains true for his SYMPHONIES. (BTW, somehow, Ashkenazy still isn't a slouch playing PROKOFIEV... )

 

SURELY! (The Sixth and the Seventh from the same set are among the best ever too.)

 

Bronth,

Who's your avatar? She looks like Tinker Bell incarnate.

 

She!