Just purchased and listened to this 7CD box of Liszt from Kurt Masur . It is one of the best things I have bought in the last couple of years. It includes all of the works for orchestra, and all of the works for piano and orhcestra -- with Michel Beroff. Excellent performances with very good sound from this 2011 box from Warner. I suppose the 2003 box from EMI Germany has the same sound. Same box, different logo. One critic says that Masur's comprehensive cycle of tone poems, symphonies and concertos is just about the best he has done for recorded music. There is praise for Beroff as a Lisztian of flair.
A beautiful Tintagel from Barbirolli. John Barbirolli London Symphony Orchestra Bax: Tintagel recorded 1965 Philharmonia Orchestra Vaughan Williams: Symphony No. 5 recorded 1962 EMI, 1994 I picked this issue because I didn't want to take a chance on the later EMI ART process disc where the engineers sometimes messed with the balance and sound.
This 2CD set arrived yesterday and since I am enjoying it, I thought I would share some thoughts here. Although the acoustic recordings that make up the first 20 min of CD1 are a bit noisier than I would like, overall the transfers are far cleaner than the OOP Pearl CD. However, the APR contains much more music, being a 2CD set rather than a single CD like the Pearl. And it's under $20 new from amazon. Transfers are by the great Mark Obert-Thorn.
As luck would have it, not long back I fell heir to an assortment of 78s from a collector friend who was downsizing, and Pouishnoff's recording of D.894 was part of the haul. It's on my "to listen to" list, but I haven't gotten to it yet. How do you like him compared to other Schubertians?
His D.894 is unique, that's for sure, at least compared to modern pianists, who play the work slower, making Leff's sound rushed.
Thanks, George. If you're ever in the mood for some positively frantic Schubert, see if you can lay hands on a copy of Ray Lev's Concert Hall Society recording of the "Reliquie." She plays the Krenek completion--very fast.
Is it the influence of Sofronitsky, and then Richter, that has led to slower (particularly first-movement) tempi in Schubert sonatas? By the way, in the "Reliquie" are there other pianists besides Richter who have recorded the incomplete third and fourth movements, rather than playing a completion or just the first two movements?
I don't know this one for sure, but that's the sort of thing Gregor Weichert did in his series. He recorded a number of the fragmentary sonatas, at least. Warning: my copies of a couple of discs from his series (ones containing music not included in the Wuhrer "complete" set) got the rot, as I discovered to my dismay when Exact Audio Copy proved unable to rip them. Gitti Pirner, in her disc of unfinished sonatas, plays only the two completed mvts. Otherwise, I know of three who have recorded Krenek's completion: Lev (as noted, WAY too fast, but the album notes include extensive, interesting commentary by Krenek about the trials and risks of writing his completion), Wuhrer, and Stanislav Khristenko on Toccata TOCC 0298 (part of a complete Krenek solo piano series; I like Wuhrer's a bit better, but Khristenko does well by the music, and unlike the others his recording is sufficiently recent that it might actually be available).
Thomas Beecham Royal Philharmonic Orchestra Strauss: Ein Heldenleben Liszt: Orpheus; Psalm 13 EMI, 1989 A very well done Orpheus and Psalm 13. I thought this issue (1989) of the Orpheus tone poem sounded better than the compressed reissue in the big box Beecham: The Later Tradition.
I just read a fantastic article by Charles Rosen on the authenticity/Early Music movement. I can't find it online but it is called "The Benefits of Authenticity", and I read it in his book Critical Entertainments. He does a great job giving an honest appraisal of the good and not so good things that have come out of the push for authenticity over the past few decades. He summarizes other articles and papers as well as adds his own commentary, both as a music analyst and as a performer. Some of his anecdotes are fascinating. Overall, his position is split between the impossibility (for him) of 'authentic' performances ever being more than an illusion at best, harmful at worst, and the fact that the movement has actually resulted in a lot of good in terms of how we conceive and realize these performances. I highly recommend it for anyone who can get their hands on it. It is detailed and informative, no matter what your feelings are on authenticity in performance. Some of the more interesting things I learned: - Bach arranged his harpsichord concerto in D minor for 4 part choir, organ, and orchestra! Unthinkable to attempt something like that today. - Mozart performed the k338 symphony indoors with forty violins, eight oboes, eight bassoons, and 12 doubles basses (!) - Period instruments go out of tune much more quickly than modern ones, and a typical performance back then would often end with the musicians horribly out of tune with each other. This is corrected on modern recordings via splicing and editing. - Mozart would perform his piano concertos on occasion with one string to a part so that the piano could be heard. - There is a long discussion of Schubert's late sonatas and the fact that they were conceived originally as salon music. He says the slower tempos and lengthy exposition repeats make more sense in a quiet, intimate setting than in the concert hall or on a recording.
Now enjoying this lovely set. How lucky we are to get such reasonably priced set, in superb transfers or such rare material. Well done, SONY Classical!
Excellent points! Thank you for sharing some of that article. Rosen also penned a book called "The Classical Style" in 1971 which makes many of the points in the article you describe and I highly recommend it. (I see it's still in print, available from Amazon.) "HIP" should not be a one-size-fits-all practice. Regarding Mozart, I recall reading a letter he wrote to his father (one of many!) wherein he describes hearing one of his symphonies played by a very large orchestra and he was absolutely thrilled by the sound. Maybe it was that K.388--I'm not sure and I'll try to find the reference--however it seemed like the piece wasn't originally scored for large orchestra, but had been adapted for the size of the orchestra at hand. There are also accounts of Haydn's late symphonies being played by large orchestras. Rosen makes the point in his book that Mozart wanted a big sound, preferring "a force almost twice that which any conductor dares to use now for a Mozart symphony," but did not often get a orchestra of such size. He goes on to say, "there is no reason today to perpetuate those conditions of eighteenth-century performance which obtained only when there was not enough money to do the thing properly." Of course, he's referring to the late classical era. That's why I don't have a problem with "big band" recordings of late classical works, if style and clarity can be maintained.
I have some of the titles on LP. ''His'' Mozart are fantastic. The Brahms are very refreshing, and may be even preferred, for those who find the Gilels recordings too heavy and massive.
Rudolf Serkin is not and never has been one of my favourite pianists, but I couldn't resist the box. I'm looking forward to exploring his performances a bit more.
It certainly is interesting, and difficult to do well. HIP is like a moving target sometimes. I will say that there are a lot of historically informed approaches that I thought greatly added to my understanding of work, first and foremost David Zinman's Beethoven symphony cycle. On the size of ensembles, Rosen quips that orchestras of Mozart and Haydn's desired sizes "would unmercifully stretch the purse of any Early Music society"! I also read that Mozart prepared two versions of symphony no. 40, with and without clarinets, depending on whether he could get clarinetists for the performance. The way they were so cavalier about things back then is reassuring to me today when I worry whether something is 'authentic'.
Wes, a question for you as our resident Glenn Gould maven: tonight as I drove home from work one of our FM stations played his second traversal of the Goldberg Vars. I don't suppose I'd heard it since it came out way back when. At that time, I didn't notice anything in particular about the piano tone, but tonight--well, my reaction was that it sounded as if he was playing one of the early digital pianos, not an acoustic grand. Now, in fairness, this was an FM broadcast from the more distant of our NPR stations (the one in Baltimore) heard over the factory stock stereo radio in my dozen-year-old Chevy, so it probably wasn't a 100% fair audition, but that said--that recording was an early digital release. Did Gould's piano (a Yamaha by then, wasn't it?) really sound like that? Or was the sound a function of early, imperfect digital recording? Thoughts? I'm an admirer, as you know, but my inclination is that he went on recording much longer than was really good for him. The earlier material from the 78 and early LP eras is his best, to my way of thinking. Of course, the clarinet was still a very new invention, and I imagine clarinettists, or at least competent ones, can't have been too thick on the ground. I don't think "cavalier" is exactly right--"pragmatic" is probably closer to the mark. Music has never been all that secure a career path, and all that eyewash we hear about musicians playing just because they love their art is a load of hooey--leaving aside that they must pay for what have always been obscenely expensive tools of their trade, they need to eat and pay mortgages or rent just like the rest of us. Composers back then could never be sure what forces might be available at any given time, and they made their money in part by selling sheet music to as wide an array of home musicians as possible, so naturally they tended not to be "picky" about who played their music on what. At least some of Mozart's piano sonatas, for instance, were sold as playable on piano or harpsichord (then still a fixture in many households), even though in point of fact there was no way anybody could do them justice on the older instrument.
My thought is, you definitely need a new car radio. No, seriously, I think it was a combination of factors that created a "digital piano" sound. While Gould was using a 9-foot Yamaha concert grand, he paid a technician to tweak (voice) it for his preferred clean, dry, light tone. He actually told the guy to "think harpsichord" (!)... Not that Gould really wanted that sound, but he also didn't want a rich Romantic tone for Bach. That's one factor. Another is that the FM station may have been spinning the original CD, which had a thin sound like most CDs that came out when digital recording was in its infancy. The newer CD (remastered from the analogue backup tape) presents a fuller piano tone. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if that radio station was adding considerable compression to the audio signal, further flattening the piano timbre. And then there's your dozen-year-old stock Chevy radio, adding it's own sonic signature. I won't go there. Get the new CD of the '81 recording and play it at home; I doubt it will sound to you like a big concert grand, but I also doubt it will sound like what you heard in the car.
Just to be clear, the new CD Wes is referring to is the mastering that was first issued in the State of Wonder three CD set. I am not sure if this mastering was reissued later.
That's still the best way to buy the remaster, IMHO, since the State of Wonder CD also includes the '55 recording and extras. The "Remastered Original Jacket Collection" also contained it, but that big box is now out of print and getting harder to find at a decent price.
