That's what I've been trying to do with the numerous currently available Beethoven Piano Sonatas cycles - both old, not-so-old and new - these last few months and my personal taste comes before the musicians' abilities, though in the case of (for instance) Wilhelm Backhaus it's been very difficult, as his anachronistic playing style is a bit of a mess, at least that's how it sounds to me. Yet it does have something that keeps drawing me back to his interpretations, even though I find them quite fatiguing in the long run. More recent cycles by pianists of the "younger generation", like Mélodie Zhao for example, don't really do it for me, too "samey", little depth.
Understood. We can go crazy comparing different interpretations. To make matters even more complicated, our own interpretation changes with time as well. For Beethoven's sonatas, I've done like you many years ago - to find whomever has that something that touches my inner voice and stick with that interpretation. In my case, it remains Schnabel - along with all the faulty notes.
Ah yes, Schnabel. I have the Naxos cycle which I think is a good compromise between relatively reasonable sound and (not too much) sound restoration. He's really hors concours as far as I'm concerned. I already have lots of Beethoven Piano Sonatas cycles (currently 21, both complete and almost complete) but keep searching for more... It does depend on the mood I'm in, sometimes I reach for Kempff's mono set or Arrau's 1960s set, and sometimes I prefer harder hitting players like Rudolf Serkin (I didn't like him at first), then again someone "in between". Fun, really
21??? Wow. Strangely, the Naxos version is the only one I haven't heard. I have the Seraphim LPs, which are the same as the original EMI LPs, which sound the best compared to the other incarnations I've heard. The EMI CDs are no-noised to death; the Pearl has way too much surface noise (not from the same source as the others), but I'm curious about the Naxos, though.
They should have used EMI's LP transfers for their CD-set, there was no need for that extreme noise reduction. I haven't heard the Schnabel set that was recently released by Warner, the new owners of EMI - I read somewhere it was also processed too much.
As for living conductors, Haitink, Jansons, Pinnock and JEG are probably the only four I would bother to attend their concerts. In other words, I can count them on one hand. Eschenbach is decent, but he is too into modern classical ...
You certainly have more versions of Beethoven Piano Sonatas than any other participants of this thread. I think I have maxed out at around 14 or 15. I do not want to bother with the versions by Charles Rosen or Leon Fleischer though I do have versions by Kovacevich and Rudolf Serkin - so there are some American pianists in my collection for these works ...
Nope. I've heard snippets on Dutch radio, but many of these younger pianists leave me pretty cold, though I must admit their technique is usually impeccable.
IMHO, comparing these younger pianists to the old masters is like comparing some of the best current footballers to Johan Cruijff. The verdict is quite clear. They may be stronger and faster but they are not better ...
Unfortunately, all the latest advancements in recording technologies were not available to the old masters. When the original analog masters have limitations, any subsequent processing can only improve the sound so much. I think people continue to confuse better sound with better performance ...
A lot of people still think that in my experience. They have no idea what the difference is between the two and they don't care either...
On the turntable tonight...I posted about this LP a long time ago in a different thread, it has a severe warp on the outside edge in one spot, like it was exposed to heat (sun) and had to about 1.5 inches in to get the stylus to not skip. After several months of having it tightly packed in a row of my "too noisy to play but I need to keep" LPs in the basement, the warp has smoothed out some, and I can start playing it from just shy of an inch from the edge. I don't think it's going to get any better than that. I was, and am, too chicken to try to heating it in the oven and pressing it out. IMO, there is no better Nielsen 4 than this one...nor is there a better Nielsen 2 than CSO/Gould...
There is little truth in marketing or advertising when it comes to classical music. Record companies need new faces and will bend over backward to promote the new artists to justify higher prices for their new recordings.
Last year, when I was still trying to sell a lot of duplicate CDs but had a hard time finding a buyer (I finally did find one), I offered most of the discs for free to a contact of mine who had a nice collection of LPs and CDs; he looked at me as if I was a relic from a few hundred years ago and, in a rather condescending way, said that he had been streaming music for a long time now and wouldn't "go back in time". To each their own.
Streaming in MP3 or in some hi-res format? CD is hi-res. I just ripped 115 CD's in the FLAC format to a 32 GB USB drive for my young nephew out in CA. It took me over a week from start to finish ... My understanding is the streaming provided by Spotify is still MP3.
