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WAGNER
DIE WALKURE
(CD 1 of 3 only)
Orchestra Sinfonica di Roma della RAI
Wilhelm Furtwängler conductor
Recorded in 1953
"Hearing this set was like viewing a recently restored painting, having not been aware of the layer of dirt on it until you witnessed the effect of its removal."
Henry Fogel, Fanfare
XR remastering by
Andrew Rose
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PACO 058 - Wagner
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LATEST REVIEW
| Audiophile Audition
30 November 2011
ACOUSTIC BEETHOVEN
By Gary Lemco
"Quite a demon, this Fried!"
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When we listen to the complete Beethoven Fifth Symphony (10 November 1913) with the Berlin Philharmonic under Arthur Nikisch, here restored in more than adequate sound by Andrew Rose, we hear an amazing document, a piece of modern conducting history. It was Arthur Nikisch (1855-1922) who established much of what we assume defines the modern approach to conducting. Musical personalities as different as Toscanini, Furtwaengler, Boult, Stokowski, and Reiner each admired Nikisch for the economical authority he brought before an orchestra, fixing a tempo or a cue by means of his eyes rather than by a wave of the arms. And despite the eccentricities of the period, such as the intrusive portamento in the bar lines, the musical impetus and rhythmic resilience from Nikisch remains linear, direct, and eminently dramatic. I still must qualify the term "linear," since Nikisch engages in poetic license with the recap of the first movement.
I find the Andante con moto even more miraculous than the opening hard-driven Allegro con brio movement. Despite the often "dead" sound and limited frequency range in acoustical horn reproduction, the nuance and engagement of the plastic lines of the theme and variations enjoys a wonderful sense of contour. The dynamic shifts, too, resonate as calculated and eminently balanced. Nikisch carefully opens the introduction to the Scherzo, marking a deliberate tempo and holding the long-note values. The bristling effect of the dialogue among winds, strings, and tympani proves effective; and then the basses begin the contrapuntal sequence that forcefully layers itself with considerable impact, except for the thinness of the upper acoustic of the period before electrical recording. Still, the advancing pizzicati move us inexorably to the transition to the tympanic beats before the colossal burst of energy that marks the final Allegro. What jubilation can be drawn out from these antique records Nikisch exacts with determined abandon, the devil with the slides and shifting agogics. The high winds make their presence known, and the mounting frenzy culminates in a fearsome climax, only to build itself anew. The extended coda sings and edifies simultaneously; even as a mere shadow of what Nikisch's powers were like, it exerts a mystical power over us "advanced" listeners.
No less a force in the conducting world stands Oskar Fried (1871-1941), friend and admirer of Gustav Mahler and the first to record a complete Mahler symphony on records. Fried's titanic Eroica (1924), despite the limitations of the acoustic process, engages us with its combination of directed vehemence and tender lyricism, Fried's power to lift the melodic line en masse while preserving individual color lines. Often the very "rough edges" of the sound process add to the visceral energy Fried elicits from the BSOO, especially in the opening movement before the "theme of moral compromise" sings its siren's song. The sheer nervous energy of the Allegro con brio suffices to answer for the entire score, especially the transition to the recapitulation; but we still have three movements to go. More overtly virtuosic in execution than the Nikisch reading, the Fried remains the more difficult to classify except on its own idiosyncratic terms. That Fried can find a moment of chamber-music intimacy in the midst of an emotional whirlwind seems a minor musical miracle. The emergence of the triumphant trumpets for the last pages marks a peroration of uncommon potency.
Fried's individual rhythmic license can be heard to great effecting in the Marche funebre, in which the adjustments to both the dynamic level and linear progression often prove startling and unprecedented. Given the basic pulse Fried establishes, there still seems an incredible fluctuation of the individual melodic lines, compressed and unified through some individual musical will. The diaphanous, even punishing, colors of the polyphony in Beethoven pose yet another moment of uncanny individualism in Fried's vision, a personality rife with daring imaginative flair. Has the trump of doom in the middle of the movement ever seemed so akin to the music of Berg and Schreker? All of Liszt and much of Wagner and Strauss permeate the latter pages of the Marche, a haunted specter of catastrophe and redemption, barely distinguishable. A whirlwind Scherzo leads to the colossal "Prometheus" theme-and-variations last movement, where, once more, Fried can slow the details of Beethoven's harmony to reveal "modernist" elements that at once arrest and disturb. The accrued momentum of the latter variants overwhelms us through its intense articulation and the bravura application of speedy, demonic drive. Quite a demon, this Fried!
In his notes to this issue, editor Andrew Rose reminds us that Friedrich Kark made a "complete" Beethoven Fifth in 1910, and Henry Wood led an abridged Eroica in 1922.
Fried's Eroica, too, lack repeats at various locales. But as inscriptions by world-reputable conductors and ensembles, these discs stand as early recorded monuments to the epic personalities that imposed their visions of Beethoven's music.
PASC 310 - Beethoven
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LATEST REVIEWS
| MusicWeb International
THE FOUR 2011 RECORDINGS OF THE YEAR FROM PRISTINE
AT MUSICWEB
CLASSICAL EDITOR Rob Barnett
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A remarkable 1950s mono reading of Sibelius's four tone poems. Do not neglect the other two Pristine Ormandy Sibelius CDs. You think Ormandy's 1979 Philadelphia digital recording was good? Try this! You'll lament that CBS did not record more while the flame burned this fiercely. The Grieg suite is no less passionate - I cannot recall Morning having been played with such full-on drive and emotional engagement. Very special music-making.
PASC299 - Ormandy
Michael Cookson
Furtwängler's 1942 Berlin performance of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in D minor 'Choral', has gained legendary status. It is said to be an example of Furtwängler's rebellious response to the stresses of working with the Berlin Philharmonic as cultural propagandists for Hitler's Third Reich. Whether this is a true reflection of the situation or not this is certainly a heartfelt account of astonishing tension from Furtwängler's tortured soul. Recorded in the Alte Philharmonie in Berlin just under two years later the concert hall was raised to the ground by allied bombing. Restoration engineer Andrew Rose has done wonders with the sound quality which is much improved. A truly great performance of real historical significance.
PASC250 - Furtwängler
Michael Greenhalgh
Here's proof that recordings nearly 60 years old can still perform the vital interpretive function of bringing the works to us fresh. Scherchen's performances have the transparency of texture and rhythmic force we nowadays associate with period instruments. They also have an inspiring sense of focus and conviction.
PASC198 - Scherchen
Jonathan Woolf
This December 1926 recording of the Kreutzer Sonata by Albert Sammons and William Murdoch has been released before, on LP, but this excellent transfer is worthy of one of the great performances of the work on disc. It's coupled with a remarkable rarity, a 1937 private, and yellow labelled HMV of Faure's Op.13 Sonata played by Sammons with the little known Edie Miller. Its commercial release is a remarkable coup and reinforces Sammons's affinities with French music via his breathtaking but unsentimental lyricism.
PACM072 - Sammons
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CONTENTS
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Editorial Putting stereo drama and music together
Karajan Die Fledermaus in stereo, 1960
Fried Beethoven's Choral Symphony, 1928
PADA Poulenc & Fevrier play Satie for four hands
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Editorial - Karajan's 1960 Decca Fledermaus
The start of a revolution in stereo sound Although stereo recording had been around on an increasingly regular basis at Decca, albeit not at every recording session, from late 1955 (their first full stereo recording was actually made a year earlier in 1954 and has never been issued) onwards, the launch of a new premium opera label in 1960 and the choice of the ever-popular Die Fledermaus to begin it must have encouraged them to really pull out all the stops. With no less than three producers and two sound engineers working on the project, this was clearly no ordinary recording. And because there's a lot of dialogue and stage acting involved between the musical numbers, a good deal of work must have been put into the creation of the sonic illusions required for stereo drama, at a time when nobody had ever attempted much if any of any of this kind of thing. Innovation in this kind of field in the UK had often been developed by the BBC - who were later to be the driving force behind NICAM stereo TV broadcasts, digital radio, teletext and other such innovations. But back in 1960 they were still two years away from their first experimental stereo FM transmissions, and everything operated strictly in mono. In fact, regular stereo radio broadcasts for British listeners were still more than a decade away, beginning in 1971, and an outlet for stereo drama wasn't available until 1973. Radio drama (and its 1960s sibling, drama recorded for LP) is a curious beast. It was often said in the BBC Radio Drama department that the "pictures" on radio were far better than those on TV or film - because the listener was able to create them in his or her head and was thus not restricted to the imagination - and budget - of the set-designers and film director. By 1960 radio drama in its mono incarnation had been around for a good number of years, and there would have been an enormous amount of expertise to draw upon when producing opera or operetta stage performances for record. But as soon as you throw the concept of stereo into the mix you have to start writing a new rule book - the old way of working in many cases simply no longer applies. For a start off you're now working very much in three dimensions - yet recording on a virtual "stage" with invisible props and no scenery. A performer walking "past the listener" needs to have left-right perspective as well as front-back perspective - and if they're required to climb stairs whilst performing this needs to sound convincing too, even though stereo doesn't strictly allow for any vertical sonic illusion. Thus the days of simply standing in front of a single microphone and reading ones lines were over - enter instead the new age of complex sonic illusion. All of this would be much easier if it was simply a matter of recording dialogue - or just the music. But additionally we have to make sure that the positioning of singers matches properly where they were when they were speaking a few moments ago. We also have to consider the acoustic and the staging - moving sometimes rapidly from intimate conversation to big musical numbers yet making sense of this to a sightless listener. Assuming (and I would assume so) that dialogue and musical numbers were not necessarily recorded together, this makes for some pretty complicated and tricky recording production. Say, for example, a character is involved in a conversation whilst standing and walking to and fro. Perhaps we hear them approach us slightly as they move across the sound-stage. When the orchestra fires up and the character starts singing fifteen seconds later, should they be in the same spot and with the same perspective in which we heard them before? And if they are, but the music is being recorded four days before the speech, how do we get this to knit together so as to convince the listener that they're hearing a continuous performance, even though it took eight days to record? Not easy when all you have is perhaps three or four stereo tape machines to record onto and mix together. It's no surprise that as a result the occasional edit is obvious, especially in the dialogue, due to the new difficulties of working in stereo. The simple but sudden changing of a voice position in the soundstage, halfway through a sentence, is an instant giveaway. Yet what strikes me most when listening to this stereo Fledermaus is just how well it was done and how successfully-produced it was, at a time when the people involved would have had little experience in this kind of thing, and with some limited resources - I spotted that the "exploding coffee machine" in Act 3 came from the same gunfire sound effect recording Decca had used a couple of years earlier to represent "cannon fire" in Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, albeit with less reverberation added! Some twenty years ago I spend a month or two on a sound engineering training attachment to the BBC's Radio Drama unit. In well-equipped modern drama studios, complete with multi-surfaced staircases, anechoic chamber, gravel, sand and concrete to walk on, highly experienced production teams spent their working lives creating the same kind of stereo drama illusions Decca were working on in 1960 (albeit without the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra to worry about). The main acting took place in front of a large stereo microphone point, with floor markings to help the actors remember where they were supposed to be, both to the left and right of the microphone and to the front or back. A conversation taking place between two characters whilst drinking tea, for example, would require me (as head of tea-cup rattling and other assorted 'spot effects') to creep up behind them in my sock feet, holding appropriate tea cups and spoons and, now on my knees, hold and rattle the sound effect props at precisely the position where the actors' hands would have been had they been drinking tea rather than holding their scripts. It all involved a lot of squeezing in and out of people, whilst trying to work in a confined space and at a precise spot located a foot or two below their mouths! None of this sort of thing would have been necessary in the mono era of radio drama in 1960. A separate microphone off to one side, or even in another room, would be just fine for spot effects; other sound effects were played in on 45rpm vinyl discs specially recorded by the BBC. If a character moved to centre stage whilst talking it didn't matter from which direction he approached when working in mono - all you'd hear would be a combination of increased volume and decreased ambience around him. Stereo required all sorts of new thinking and planning, and to marry this successfully to music, without the benefits of multitrack tape, computer editing, or even prior experience, is an enormous undertaking when the results are going to be so high profile. So hats off to Decca in this regard - they did a brilliant job. Of course they had some of the finest in the business working on this project - even today, half a century later, it still sounds good. And now, in this new 32-bit Pristine XR remastering it sounds incredible. Crisp, clean, clear, and with added depth and dimension, you'd think it was recorded yesterday - a testament both to brilliant musicianship and a fantastic recording team, and an astonishingly beautiful marriage of all this with modern music restoration and remastering technology! Andrew Rose
2 December 2011
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Karajan's ground-breaking 1960 stereo Decca Fledermaus
In a stunning 21st century XR-remastering
 STRAUSS
Die Fledermaus
Recorded 1960, stereo
Producer and Audio Restoration Engineer: Andrew Rose
CAST
Rosalinde Hilde Gueden
Gabriel von Eisenstein Waldemar Kmentt
Adele Erika Köth
Falke Walter Berry
Frank Eberhard Wächter
Alfred Giuseppe Zampieri
Prince Orlofsky Regina Resnik
Dr. Blind Peter Klein
Frosch Erich Kunz
Ida Hedwig Schubert
Lord Barrymore Omar Godknow*
Ivan B. Fasolt*
Carikoni Andre von Mattoni
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra & State Opera Chorus Herbert von Karajan conductor
*We assume these two are pseudonyms - we think they're "oh my god no" and "beef assault" (beef and salt?) if you read them out loud...
Web page: PACO 068
Short Notes
It's not often that we get to remaster a recording made especially to launch a new record label, but this is one of those rarities. In the summer of 1960 Decca pulled out all the stops for this spectacular stereo recording of Strauss's Die Fledermaus.
Sending no less than three producers and two senior sound engineers to Vienna to capture the fabulous sound of Karajan, a peerless cast and the superb Vienna Philharmonic, this was the recording which launched a special new premium opera label.
Half a century later it still sounds good - but in this new 32-bit Pristine XR remastering it sounds incredible. Crisp, clean, clear, and with added depth and dimension, you'd think it was recorded yesterday - a testament both to brilliant musicianship and a fantastic recording team, and an astonishingly beautiful marriage of all this with modern music restoration and remastering technology!
Review LP reissue (excerpt)
Yet another Fledermaus! A dashing, spirited and exuberant Fledermaus which offers some surprises as well. As on the Columbia version of 1955, Karajan again conducts. But here we have Hilde Gueden (as on the Krauss/Decca set of nine years ago) as Rosalinde; and Erika Köth as Adele. The men are very good without in all cases knocking out their opposite numbers. But I am not quite persuaded yet that this Rosalinde or this Adele are going to make me forget my allegiance to La Schwarzkopf and the slightly neater and sweeter Rita Streich in these roles. But Miss Gueden, if she has not quite the same swooping and flouncing grace, is very good indeed at all testing points: "Mein Herr was dachten sic von mir?" and the Czardas. Perhaps there is not quite so much manner in her acting. Or it may be that there are far more "production touches" in general in this new set than in the older one, so that she does not seem so dominating a lady. For instance, when the pretended French Marquis arrives at the party music is playing very faintly in a distant room and as he comes in, unmistakably, there steals on the air a faint faint snatch of La Marseillaise!
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The great thing perhaps to emphasise is that this is a very lively peformance of Die Fledermaus itself and the spirit, acting and atmosphere really come streaming across the footlights. The stereo is that much preferable, but both seem to me brilliant.
P. H-W. - The Gramophone, November 1960
Notes On this recording
This recording of Die Fledermaus was chosen by Decca to launch a premium-price opera label, and in its original release included a sequence at the end of the second act, Prince Orlofsky's Gala Ball, in which a series of Decca's star singers not otherwise involved in the recording perform a series of songs, including Summertime, I Could Have Danced All Night, Anything You Can Do, and others. Although this sequence appears on subsequent Decca CD issues, it was excluded from their 1962 SXL issue and is omitted here - as the Gramophone critic noted in 1960, for some listeners it would surely constitute "a very considerable disruption of the kind of mood so far established".
My initial aim in this new transfer and 32-bit XR-remastering was simply to see what 21st century technology might bring to a superb, but now 51-year-old recording, if anything. I was delighted to discover the answer was "quite a lot" - more immediacy, vibrancy and sense of dimension that really does breathe new life to a classic. I also noted carefully the pitching, as Viennese tunings traditionally tend to be slightly sharper than the standard A4=440Hz. The recording came off the Decca LPs at A=449.24, but close analysis of residual electrical hum suggested an original tuning of A=445.67, and my restoration therefore adopts this pitch.
MP3 Sample Act 1, No. 2. Nein, mit solchen Advokaten
Listen
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PACO 068 - webpage at Pristine Classical
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One of the first truly great recordings of Beethoven's Ninth
New Obert-Thorn transfers from excellent French pressings
 BEETHOVEN
Symphony No 9 'Choral'
Recorded 1928
Producer and Audio Restoration Engineer: Mark Obert-Thorn
Lotte Leonard soprano
Jenny Sonnenberg contralto Eugen Transky tenor Wilhelm Guttmann bass
Bruno Kittel Choir · Bruno Kittel Berlin State Opera Orchestra
Oskar Fried conductor
Web page: PASC 317
Short Notes
By the time Oskar Fried made his recording in 1928 of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, a first few recordings of this monumental work had started to trickle out of the world's record companies - the probable debut had been only five years earlier in another Berlin recording, under Bruno Seidler-Winkler.
For such an early recording, Fried's style is very much forward looking, and as a result this recording stands today as one of the early greats - with four of the finest soloists of the day, coupled with what was then probably the finest orchestra in Germany and their greatest choir.
Mark Obert-Thorn last transferred this recording in 1989 for a Pearl release - in the days just before CEDAR and other technology started to revolutionise audio restoration. Now he's returned to it in a brand new transfer for this Pristine issue - an unmissable new release.
Notes on the recordings
The source for the present transfer was a set of French Polydor pressings. The exact date of recording is not known; the "Mechan. Copt." date given on the discs is 1928, although some discographic sources claim it was made the previous year. Some of the loudest choral passages overloaded the early microphones, causing a couple moments of sputtering which are inherent in the original recording.
Mark Obert-Thorn
MP3 Sample 2nd mvt Listen
Download purchase links: Mono MP3 Mono 16-bit FLAC
CD purchase links and all other information: PASC 317 - webpage at Pristine Classical
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SATIE
Piano Music for Four Hands
- La Belle Excentrique (Fantaisie Sérieuse)
- Trois Morceaux En Forme De Poire
- En Habit De Cheval
- Aperçus Désagréables
Francis Poulenc & Jacques Fevrier piano
Recorded 1959
Issued as Collection Richesse Classique - 30 RC 717
This transfer is presented with Stereo remastering by Dr. John Duffy
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