For 44 bucks, that wouldn't have bothered me (that kind of thing doesn't anyway), just like this 40 CD box I got for $15.92.
I already had the Hogwood and Brüggen Haydn boxes, and decided not to get the complete box when it was still regularly available. I managed to find the separate Hogwood BBC disc for a very nice price and didn't bother to get the Dantone.
I miss being able to go out to the thrift stores and used record stores. I was just getting into my stride..... I know you can browse on line, but never are they as cheap as at the thrift stores and you can't examine them before buying. At the moment, I have one order on its way from Spain. I'm looking forward to that.
Question for the classical music folks out there. I know there is a tendency on this forum towards "the older stuff is better" kind of opinion with most other popular music. Note, I am not making a statement that this is correct or false. However, I must admit that my preference is for older Jazz, Blues, Rock & Roll, Country, etc. with little (but some) of today's recorded music catching my attention. Is there the same tendency with classical music? Obviously so called "Classical" music was composed over the previous hundreds of years so I am speaking more about "older" vs "modern" recordings when asking this question. Furthermore, I ask this question from the the standpoint of performers, conductors, and recording techniques/sound of "modern" vs "older" recorded classical music. I have read comments about some of the old 50's & 60's Living Stereo recordings still topping very modern state of the art recordings of a given piece. I am curious about folks opinions who are active on this thread and who are much more familiar with the history of recorded classical music than myself. This is still very new musical territory and discovery for me personally. Discussion and and friendly debate over a series of posts in this thread would be fun as well so long as it is not considered a disruption to the thread. This is certainly not my intention and it seems appropriate for the broad scope of "Classical Music & Conversation" IMHO.
IMO, sometimes people (not all) who have been listening to classical music for a long time have fond memories of the music they imprinted on and prefer listening to the recordings they know from their early days. I did not listen to classical music all my life. My music collection consists of good mix of older artists/recordings and current ones. I think most of the current crop of performers rock (but so did most of the older ones.) Recordings of these current performers have the added bonus of top quality sound. But don't take my word for it - you must listen for yourself. Question the word of anyone who makes blanket dismissals of classical artists based on age. By perusing the posts in this thread you will find all the best recordings you could possibly listen to.
That's a great question, and I think there are a lot of dimensions to your question and a lot of things one could talk about. As far as new recordings go, I have the highest opinion of today's artists and labels. There are new releases all the time with high-quality, thoughtful, and unique new interpretations of works, even ones that have been recorded many times over. I think our understanding of these works is expanded by new artists' interpretations and that there is always something new to be said. Notwithstanding, you will definitely encounter the "older is better" mentality in the classical world as well.
Recorded 10/8-9/85, Powell Hall. Produced & engineered by Marc Aubort & Joanna Nickrenz, Elite Recordings Inc. NYC. Microphones: Schoeps. Console: Studer. Digital recording system: JVC. I won't post a photo, but this has the same beautiful late Angel label that I posted recently.
I coincidentally very nearly streamed this earlier. Leonard Slatkin with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra playing Copland on RCA Red Seal is one of my very first classical music purchases, sometime around 1989 or 1990 when I was 16 or 17, but it was Symphony no. 3 and Music For a Great City, which totally turned me on to Copland, and I always feel like Slatkin got kind of short shrifted.
I am not sure that statement is statistically supported in this thread. I am probably one of the more oldies type posters here because I mostly play vinyl. So I have a major cutoff around 1990. I do have some CDs and SACDs of post 1990 performances. Most others play a lot of CDs so are not bound by that. Further you have to break this out by genre and period. Medieval/Renaissance music was rarely issued in the LP era so 90% of the recordings are on CDs and many CDs are fairly recent. Baroque music was more frequently performed in the old days but using a large modern orchestra. The changeover to HIP styles in the 80s and 90s mostly fossilized those earlier recordings with only a few exceptions. The Classical era and the Romantic era are where you tend to see more preference for older recordings. Part of this is simply that those artists grew up in that tradition and lived and breathed it. Also there was intense interest and support among the middle class culture for it then which made it more lucrative to try and earn a living from it compared to most other fields. Also the repertoire was narrower so the best performers had time to hone their interpretations. 20th C music goes the other way as most orchestras were rather flummoxed by it since it was new and stylistically far from classical/romantic music. So later performances are often performed better. Occasionally a great conductor could make something of these works anyway so a few of their recordings here are still esteemed. There are also differences for opera which is a distinct field. As before older performers of classical and romantic operas tend to be esteemed because the singing styles were optimized for it and the repertoire was limited. Baroque opera is performed better nowadays than before as are modern operas for the most part.
I stopped a couple of years ago after over twenty years. It's still good, but I was getting into box sets.
I received a one-year gift subscription from my late mother-in-law though I did not renew the subscription. While I had one listen to each CD, I only flipped through a few pages of some of the mags ...
Two of my priceless thoughts: 1. The definitions of old and new keep changing. The recordings of many artists from, say, the 1940s onward have been remastered with new, fabulous sound quality and re-issued. Is that old or new? (Although, the real question, as we all know, is, "Is there a box set involved?" ) 2. There are many classical music lovers who are drawn by interpretations of works, more or less regardless of recording quality, and whether or not the recordings are old or new. Thus, a transfer of a work from a 78, even with issues of noise, very limited frequency range, etc., might be preferable to a much more modern digitally recorded version. "Favorite" versions can include recordings decades apart. For example, the recent NY Times "best" Beethoven symphonies list included recordings from approximately 1951 to 2015, a span of about 65 years. (As for me, I used to love seeing that DDD on CDs, and I haven't changed much.)
I keep thinking this would be a fun place to play with a concept that goes back several centuries in Japan (and perhaps elsewhere), that of renku, or linked verse. There was a tradition of poets meeting for poetry gatherings at which they exchanged verses, usually of the tanka form (longer than the haiku, with a 5-7-5-7-7 pattern of syllables) with each new poem offered somehow linked to the poem that preceded it. The link could be in one of many forms--sometimes a certain phrase was repeated or varied or alluded to; sometimes an image provided the link; sometimes it was an allusion to an image in a famous poem that somehow referred back to an image in a preceding poem, etc. (the poets would read out their compositions on the spot for each other after they had finished writing them, taking turns). Sometimes a series of linked verses went on for a very long time. I thought of this because, unintentionally, I've got a series of links going here. Today, I first posted a harpsichord record on Columbia. I followed that with another disc of entirely different music, but again on Columbia with a similar catalog number, the music by Tchaikovsky. I’ve followed that with more Tchaikovsky, but a record on the London label (Treasury Series) that includes music by Mozart. So, next, I might play the Vaughn Williams London Symphony, say, or something else by Mozart, or something entirely different musically, but in the London Treasury Series, or conducted by Solti, or performed by the same orchestra…. You get the idea.
The early days of DIGITAL. They really wanted to call your attention to it. Most of the selections are arranged/orchestrated by Wilson. Producer: Patti Laursen. Engineer: Robert Norberg. Recorded in the First Presbyterian Church, Hollywood using the Sony PCM Recorder. Percussionist Ed Mann, who played & recorded with Frank Zappa, plays on this album.
On the turntable: Continuing with the "linked listening" idea--link no. 4. Here the link is through the Israel Philharmonic.
