FREE ALBUM
| 
| |
A FREE 128k MP3
Paul Paray - German Music
Brahms 4th
Wagner
Clifford Curzon piano
Vienna Philharmonic
Hans Knappertsbusch
Rec. 1953/55
"Paray's Brahms Fourth is a performance to sit up and take notice of. There is tremendous tension and drama in Paray's reading, in part due to the cumulative power he achieves through a driving forward momentum, but also in large part due to the eruptive volcanic energy he unleashes in the swelling crescendos and clashing cross-rhythms..."
- FANFARE
Download it now - for one week only - it's only free from our Cover Page!
"UPGRADE" to full quality lossless 16-bit or 24-bit FLAC downloads with notes here:
PASC 241
|
LATEST REVIEW
| Audiophile Audition
13 June 2012
24-BIT DOWNLOADS
By Peter Joelson
"the 24 bit transfer also comes into its own, producing a full fat sound compared with the leaner EMI CD. Marvellous stuff!"
| |
Three fairly recent 24 bit downloads from Pristine Audio caught my interest due to their being much-loved recordings from my youth. I have labelled these 24/44.1 as they have been up-sampled to 24/48 because that rate is more compatible with DVD players, and I am going to concentrate on the technical aspects as the musical content has already been reviewed here.
Clemens Krauss (1893-1954) was a very fine conductor; in addition, he was a good friend of Richard Strauss and made recordings of his music over a considerable period. The most famous of these is the series he made for Decca during the early 1950s which reappeared on LP on various bargain labels before Testament issued the lot in a fresh remastering on CDs.
The recording quality of Also Sprach Zarathustra wasn't of the greatest even taking into consideration its recording date. Recorded in June 1950 at the Musikverein, Vienna, it sounded increasingly poor during its life on LP though the Testament CD release was an ear-opener for me. It's an excellent performance, Krauss keeping a firm hand on the architecture of the whole rather than a series of incidentals, and the orchestra's lower brass produces the rudest noises of any recording I have heard. There is not much to choose from between the Testament CD and Pristine's release, Andrew Rose extracting from an LP's grooves an extraordinary improvement over the original LP itself. However, his careful stabilising of pitch using Celemony's Capstan software adds to the value of this release.
Recorded a few days later in June 1950, Till Eulenspiegel and Don Juan have always give me the impression that they are more comfortably recorded. The 24 bit files from Pristine give a deep sound-stage and the more lightly scored sections sound like much more recent recordings to me. The opening of Don Juan shows what results from enormous experience in playing a piece, a unanimity akin to chamber music. There is not the enormous difference between the sound quality of 24 bit flac and 16 bit mp3 that will be found in more modern recordings, nor is the result an audiophile experience. The results, though, are what admirers of these Krauss recordings were hoping for, as good as possible for 2012. If the master tapes are still in good condition a fresh transfer from these may produce even better results; in today's economic climate a fresh transfer seems very unlikely. Five star performances.
Ruggiero Ricci's recordings of two violin concertos in the standard repertoire date from all of six and a half years later during which time great advances had been made in recording. Not only had tape improved, but original stereo recording was the norm in 1957, just a few mono recordings appearing from the UK and U.S. majors from that date. While the opening of Ricci's account of the Mendelssohn sounds a wee bit too effortful to me, the Bruch remains one of the most successful in the catalogue, and the Kingsway Hall recording quality is excellent. Ricci is forwardly balanced, though not as far forward as Heifetz. Heifetz's recordings are available on SACD; I find the Mendelssohn played as though Heifetz hated the outer movements, which he didn't seem to in his earlier recording with Beecham.
For me, the cream of this selection comes in the third release here, Poulenc's music recorded in 1961 with Georges Prêtre, Rosanna Carteri and Maurice Duruflé, at least some of it in the presence of the composer. I would be surprised to learn that these superb performances have ever been out of the catalogue. As a substantial bonus, Francis Poulenc and Georges Auric play duets by Eric Satie, Parade and two of the Trois morceaux en forme de poire, nicely transferred from 1937 recordings on 78s.
However, the recording of the organ concerto has always, until now, suffered from a condition afflicting a number of recordings of orchestra with organ, a rather noticeable disparity of pitch, a quarter tone, between them. Again, it's Celemony's Capstan and Pristine's Andrew Rose to the rescue, and the problem has been ameliorated. In addition, the 24 bit transfer also comes into its own, producing a full fat sound compared with the leaner EMI CD. Marvellous stuff!
|
RECENT REVIEW
| MusicWeb International
13 June 2012
CARL SCHURICHT
by Jonathan Woolf
"These unusual Berlin and Milan recordings fit quite well together and have been splendidly transferred"
| |
Toward the end of the Second World War a number of leading German musicians were, in the parlance of the time, 'tipped off' that they were about to be arrested. One thinks of Kulenkampff, for example, the leading resident German violinist. Then there was Carl Schuricht who, like the fiddle player, escaped to Switzerland. Before such action became a necessity he had left a series of wartime inscriptions, and some are presented here. The Italian series was made in Milan in 1941 and the Berlin sides followed a year later.
These latter discs were made for Grammophon. Mark Lothar (1902-45) was then forty and his recent Schneider Wibbel, composed in 1938 to be precise, offers a compendium of chic and amusing gestures, none at all threatening, in music devoid of modernist hues. There are hints perhaps of Richard Strauss in a piece brimming with sentiment, and a truly lovely central lyrical section which is the heart of the overture. It's heard in an excellent post-war pressing, with plenty of detail. Franck's Le Chasseur maudit is a wartime pressing and not quite so well detailed. Nevertheless Schuricht takes good tempi, and transitions are well managed. Tension is maintained, the brass demonstrates fortitude, and the strings are characteristically well drilled, if one can put it thus of wartime Berlin. It's not a helter-skelter performance by any means. For increased adrenalin levels you need performances by such as Beecham and Munch.
The Italian sequence begins with Riccardo Zandonai's Serenata Medioevale which was written in 1912 for solo cello, horns, harp and strings. It's highly evocative and sensitively contoured, charming in its innocence and scene setting. The solo cellist is Enzo Martinenghi, principal of the orchestra of La Scala, Milan. He plays with considerable lyricism but his sound is rather nasal and he is set backwardly in the balance. Rezniček's overture to Donna Diana was the 'filler' to the Serenata; four minutes of genial and engaging fun. But Schuricht's major undertaking, as represented in this disc, was his Milan recording of Richard Strauss's Symphonia Domestica, a work you'd have thought he'd have made back in Berlin. Recorded on five 78s this is a cogent, well played and in many ways penetrating reading of a score that sometimes receives a less than perspicacious run-through. The recording quality is significantly better than the Zandonai - it was recorded slightly later in the year -and shows Schuricht responding in a level-headed way. Of contemporaneous recordings, the live wartime Strauss-conducted performance is on Preiser. The post-war Krauss in Vienna was excellent, Karajan and Reiner even better. But Ormandy's Philadelphia 78 set, on five discs too, was a real blockbuster and considerably more heated than Schuricht's.
Notwithstanding such interpretative niceties, these unusual Berlin and Milan recordings fit quite well together and have been splendidly transferred by Mark Obert-Thorn.
LINK
|
RECENT REVIEW
| Audiophile Audition
9 June 2012
MISCHA ELMAN
by Gary Lemco
"Russian violin virtuoso Mischa Elman finds colorful representation in these restorations, 1931-1951 from Mark Obert-Thorn, who provides us three novelties in the Elman legacy"
| |
Second only to Fritz Kreisler in popularity and "romantic" appeal, Mischa Elman (1891-1967) came from the same Leopold Auer tradition as Jascha Heifetz, although Elman's essentially passionate approach stood in dire contrast to the seemingly objective Heifetz style. Producer and restoration engineer Mark Obert-Thorn has assembled a program that extends the Elman studio legacy with three novel works, the Beethoven Romance in F (30 November 1932), the Vivaldi Concerto (29 September 1931), and the extended arrangement of Paganini's A Minor Caprice (3 April 1951)-the last transferred from 45 rpm 7-inch discs.
A curious blend of diverse musical styles, the Vivaldi Concerto combines the composer's lightly operatic style with a series of "Romantic" mannerisms in Elman's playing, not the least of which are slides and affected rubati that shift the metrics and accents rather willfully. Still, the playing carries a lovely sincerity of expression, and Lawrence Collingwood, himself a composer and recording producer of note, supports Elman in every musical decision. The Adagio carries an intimate devotional atmosphere, again the New Symphony strings' engaging in portamenti that would no longer be deemed authentic. Elman himself plies his instrument in ardently breathed phrases, the trills eminently rounded and sweet. The final Allegro, in this marcato tempo, assumes the air of a courtly dance with an active bass line. Never permitting a harsh or discordant effect, Elman plays the music for its antique gemutliche charm, not for any visceral bravura.
Collingwood's ensemble for the two Beethoven Romances (1932) remains unknown; but given Collingwood's happy association with Albert Coates, we might assume members of the LSO. Elman takes fewer liberties here than in Vivaldi, projecting a clean even chaste sound in the 1802 G Major Romance, at times urging an air of salon chamber music upon the occasion. The second half of the work becomes almost dainty, a demure evocation of a concertante cassation or serenade. For the 1795 F Major Romance, Elman and Collingwood take a stance commensurate with the work's namesake, evoking a tenderly amorous sensibility. An extended rondo with a developed coda, it too delves into the minor for contrast, a plaintive moment that Elman exploits graciously.
The Paganini Caprice arrangement comes from Elman himself; and for piano accompaniment Elman has the reliable support of his old companion Wolfgang Rose. The piece evolves as a series of variations that employ virtuoso techniques, like high harmonics, sur le pont (on the bridge), quick alternation between arco and pizzicato articulation, and double and triple-stopping. The penultimate variation features an unaccompanied cadenza of considerable bravura playing, an indication that Elman might have indulged in the larger Paganini oeuvre had he so chosen.
The Mendelssohn Concerto from Chicago (8 March 1947) under Belgian master and former violinist Desiree Defauw (1885-1960) moves with considerable vitality in the opening movement, Allegro appassionato-more so than I recall when having heard Elman live at Lewisohn Stadium around 1963 under Alfredo Antonini. Elman negotiates Mendelssohn's musical periods with clean facility, the phrases arched and poignant, never drooping with false sentiment. The intensity and thoughtful pacing of the first movement cadenza approximates what we might have expected in an unaccompanied Bach partita. Good bassoon transition to the romantic Andante in C, pure Elman territory for tender affection. Elman milks the phrases a bit much for my taste, but we can see why he reigned in the popular style that did not demand an overly intellectual approach. No delay, and we enter the razzle-dazzle of the Allegro molto vivace, the concerto's "fiddler's" movement. Elman quite meets the demands of its knotty articulation and whirlwind filigree without problems, calling no attention to anything except the sheer and acrobatic line that he and Defauw execute with seamless abandon. The Chicago Symphony sound, by the way, carries every nuance with verve and decisive authority in this fine restoration.
LINK
|
|
|
CONTENTS
| |
Editorial Silence is truly golden - at last!
Furtwängler Brahms' 2nd Piano Concerto with Edwin Fischer
Paray Franck, Ibert, Ravel & Chabrier - c'est Français!
PADA Backhaus's 1934 Bach Pastorale
|
Finally - a truly silent PC that doesn't cost a fortune
With a unified remote control, entirely through the TV This weekEdward Johnson, stalwart of the Stokowski Society, is also a big fan of the French conductor Paul Paray, and over the last couple of years he's been on something of a mission to try and get the complete Mercury mono recordings reissued through Pristine. This week sees the penultimate volume - an excellent collection of French music, including Franck's Symphony, recorded during Paray's first week of recording sessions with the Detroit Symphony for Mercury. This was made during a week which produced a remarkable four LP's-worth of completed material, getting everyone off to a flying start. The Franck received a very warm review from Gramophone upon its UK release a few years later. It's coupled with a 1955 LP which pulls together what you might think of as "tourist" works by Ibert, Ravel and Chabrier. The latter two prefer to take their holidays in Spain, it would appear (Ravel of course had strong connections to the country, with a Spanish mother and an upbringing just over the French-Spanish border, whilst Chabrier's influence was a visit to Spain in 1882), whilst Ibert prefers to sail around the Mediterranean, stopping of at Rome, Palermo, Tunis and Nefta before ending up too in the Spanish port of Valencia. The recordings were nicely made by Mercury - have a listen to the sample track, Chabrier's España, below. Meanwhile we draw our short season of Furtwängler's Brahms to an end - for the time being at least - with his fabulous Brahms Piano Concerto No. 2, taken from a 1942 radio broadcast with Edwin Fischer at the keyboard. Truly one of the great performances, I've been able to work minor miracles on the rather grim sound quality of the original, which proved to have a lot more sonic detail hidden within than was immediately apparent. The third movement provides our sample here, beginning with a lengthy section for solo cello which is just gorgeous to hear! The sense of "being there" (which given the location and date is perhaps not where any of us would really wish to be) is really apparent, something that could never be said for the flat original. I chose the Schumann to accompany it partly on grounds of duration (Furtwängler's lengthy Brahms makes for difficult couplings) and partly because of the great links between the two composers during Brahms' formative years. Alas neither the recording nor the performance stands up to the quality of the Brahms, but as the only surviving recording of Furtwängler conducting this piece it's surely worth working on getting to as good a state as possible. If all this Furtwängler Brahms has been too much for you, next week sees his arch rival tackling the same composer's symphonic repertoire - a double-CD release of Toscanini's RCA recordings of the four Brahms symphonies that's sounding pretty spectacular. You can fit them all onto 2 CDs when he conducts them - not something you can say for Furtwängler! Finally I also wanted you to know that there will be no new releases on 6th July, 24 and 31 August, and that increasing hard drive prices coupled with ever-increasing content will see a price rise for our Digital Music Collection drives from the start of August. Precise details are still to be settled but I expect an increase of around 10% over current prices. Finally - A completely silent Audio/Video PC!More than once this year I've written about my annoyance with the constant irritating noise emanating from the small PC I use in my living room for music and video replay. I knew I needed a quiet computer and had done all I could to try and minimise unwanted sound. The main storage drives (all mirrored RAID drives, meaning automatic back-up of everything I have in my music and video collections) sit in the office, two floors above the living room, so there's no constant whirring from the hard disks. These are connected by the highest-speed wi-fi connection it's possible to buy right now, which allows me to play full HD movies across the connection with ease. Meanwhile the PC itself was sold as a quiet machine. Even so, I took out the 2.5 inch disk drive it came with and replaced it with a solid state drive (SSD) - basically the same size and shape as a regular drive but instead of having rotating platters inside, it's full of memory chips which replicate the storage facility but have no moving parts. It also operates considerably faster than a regular drive, making start-up times for Windows 7, my operating system of choice, much swifter than was originally the case. This was fine for a while. There was a low "whoosh" of air being swept through the PC by a couple of small fans, but this was pretty much inaudible when music was playing. If we lived in a regular house or apartment in a town or city, rather than a rural village house with stone walls two feet thick (making for a very quiet room), it would probably merge with the ambient noise of life. But no, I could just about hear it, and sometimes found it very slightly annoying when nothing was playing, but otherwise not worth worrying about. Unfortunately, and you may have experienced this, things that move around a lot - such as computer fans (and disk drives) - tend to get noisier with age. After a couple of years the quiet whoosh had become an annoying whine, and seemed to be getting louder almost on a daily basis. OK, so it wasn't heard with music at a decent volume, but it became an itch I had to keep on scratching... I spent quite a bit of time, though fortunately not too much money, investigating and trying out alternative fans. But the fan size I needed turned out to be unconventional and replacements were hard to find. One I tried worked fine from a sound point of view but because it was a thinner fan it passed less air over the main processor, or CPU, which then overheated, causing the computer to crash. Then I tried a device which allows you to interrupt the electrical supply to the fan and manually control its speed using a rotary dial which can live inside or outside of the computer's case. This was fine at first - I could turn the original fan speed right down, lowering the noise back to near-whisper levels, without overheating the CPU. But I soon discovered that although the fan in question was mounted on the CPU, it also blew air over the metal heatsink attached to the neighbouring graphics processor chip, helping to cool this too. So although the main processor was running fine temperature-wise, its fan-less neighbour was not. Result: random computer crashes. I had to turn the fan back up to full speed - and all along it seemed to keep on getting noisier, and certainly getting on my nerves. So I started to investigate the alternatives, but they all seemed to involve either changing my system entirely at great expense (moving to Apple) or building a fan-less PC at great expense with a custom case that itself cost around €250. Add to that a new motherboard, chip, memory and custom power supply and suddenly even the Apple option seemed viable - but what a lot of money to spend on such a relatively small irritation! Not something I could get past the dear lady wife... Then last week I stumbled across a small PC manufacturer called Shuttle. Among other things, it makes a range slimline silent "barebone" PCs. These come in a basic form of customised internal components in a specially designed case, but they lack any hard drive, CD/DVD player, memory, keyboard, mouse, monitor and so on. However the price was very attractive, and the one that fitted my needs perfectly came in at less than the cost of the custom case alone that I'd already seen. For some this is a starting point in filling shopping baskets and building a system from scratch, but for me the rest of the system was already in place - it was only the central bit that was causing a problem. I have Windows 7 already installed on my SSD hard drive. I have keyboard, monitor, pro-grade USB sound converter, specialist wi-fi receiver and so on. I just needed a silent central unit to connect them all into. So I ordered the Shuttle PC last Tuesday, and added in €20-worth (4GB) of memory for good measure. It arrived on Saturday morning, and within 20 minutes I'd opened up the old PC, removed the hard drive, popped it into the Shuttle PC, slotted in the memory board, screwed it back together (there's only one screw), attached the special foot which lifts it off the ground (see below) and allows convection air currents to keep the whole thing cool, plugged it all in and powered it up. Windows quickly found the essential drivers for keyboard, mouse, monitor and so on, and I had already downloaded the latest drivers for the PC's motherboard and video hardware onto the hard drive, ready to install. Fifteen minutes later it was up and running, and eerily silent! If it wasn't for a very bright white LED power light you'd not know it was on unless you were using it! One video output goes to a PC monitor, the other, an HDMI connection, goes to the TV. It works and, because it's more powerful than the PC it replaced, seems to handle everything I throw at it without breaking into a sweat. Processor temperatures are remarkably stable, whatever I ask of it, and on average 45C lower than what's regarded as the upper limit for safe operation. I'd say that's a good margin for error. And with no moving parts there's nothing to gradually wear out or start making an annoying whine in the years to come... It gets betterWhile I was digging around for information about this new machine, I tripped over a discussion about "CEC", a feature of my TV that I'd never come across before, but promised to be mighty interesting. It's neatly summed up at Wikipedia: Consumer Electronics Control (CEC) is an HDMI feature designed to allow the user to command and control up-to ten CEC-enabled devices, that are connected through HDMI, by using only one of their remote controls (for example by controlling a television set, set-top box, and DVD player using only the remote control of the TV). CEC also allows for individual CEC-enabled devices to command and control each other without user intervention.
This cropped up in a forum discussion about XBMC, the software I use for music and video. I discovered that I could add in a small black box, made by a company called Pulse Eight, attached to a USB port on the PC for control and into the HDMI output of the PC to send the video picture to the TV. The video passes through the box and goes onwards to the TV, but crucially the box allows the TV to control XBMC - and vice versa. (I also had to download a slightly modified, but still free version of XBMC from Pulse Eight to make their CEC box work with it.) I'll admit this wasn't for the non-technically-DIY minded. The CEC box arrived from Pulse Eight in a padded envelope, accompanied by a USB cable and nothing else. Drivers and instructions had to be downloaded from their website, and it took a bit of fiddling around before I managed to make it work reliably, and I'm still not sure quite what I did to make that happen, but it's been consistently operational thereafter, and I'm happy with it, albeit after some initial frustration in getting it to work. But start to work it did. By selecting CEC-XBMC as an input source on the TV, now the TV's remote control was directly controlling the replay software on my PC, even though the PC has no remote control and I point the zapper at the TV, not the PC. I can navigate up and down through the various menus, use the play, pause, stop, forward, rewind buttons, and so on. Suddenly it feels like XBMC is somehow built into the TV (with sound through the hi-fi of course), rather than coming to it from a PC. What happens of course is that the black box intercepts messages from the TV that come back down the same cable that is sending it TV pictures from the PC. It's these messages which allow me to use the TV remote to control my PC software, and it all integrates very nicely and totally seamlessly. I've also set it up to control things the other way too: when I start XBMC on the PC it now automatically turns on the TV, and with that, control of the PC audio and video software is thus taken on by the TV's remote. With this in place it was just a short step to using a single on/off button - the power switch for the Shuttle PC - to start up the computer, connect the network drives, load up XBMC, turn on the TV, and display the main XBMC screen upon it, ready for viewing and listening controlled by a single TV remote. It feels revolutionary today. By next week it'll seem not only entirely natural, but it'll be unimaginable for it not to work like this. If I didn't occasionally use the Internet on the PC's monitor whilst watching TV I could ditch the monitor, keyboard and mouse entirely and mount the PC on the back of the TV, out of sight (there's a special mount Shuttle sell for just this). And it all happens in an eerie silence that I'm still getting used to...  | | Shuttle Barebone XS35GTV2 PC |
Andrew Rose
15 June 2012
|
Furtwängler and Fischer deliver a classic Brahms 2nd Piano Concerto Delivered here with a fullness and presence that only adds to the experience  FURTWÄNGLER
conducts Brahms & Schumann Recorded 1942 Producer and Audio Restoration Engineer: Andrew Rose BRAHMS Piano Concerto No. 2 in B flat, Op. 83
SCHUMANN Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 54
Edwin Fischer piano (Brahms) Walter Gieseking piano (Schumann)
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra
Wilhelm Furtwängler conductor
Web page: PASC 347
Short notes
"There is "youthful" willingness on the part of Furtwängler and Fischer to give generously of themselves. They follow where the music leads and appear to revel in its many planes of sound and its contrasting emotions. With this comes the sensation of an autumn tempest eventually playing itself out and leaving in its wake coolness and serenity."
- John Ardoin, "The Furtwängler Record"
There are only two recordings of Furtwängler conducting a Brahms piano concerto - both the Second - and this, with Edwin Fischer, is by far the classic performance. A wartime broadcast from Berlin, it managed to survive in less than optimal conditions; now this new 32-bit Pristine XR remastering sheds new light on a masterpiece, with hugely improved sound and dynamics and a tremendous sense of presence and occasion.
It's coupled with the only known recording of Furtwängler conducting Schumann's Piano Concerto, again from 1942 Berlin.
Notes On this recording
Both of these wartime recordings originated as radio broadcasts and were among a number which disappeared into the Soviet Union at the end of World War II. They suffer similar defects to the majority of Furtwängler's wartime broadcasts, both in sound balance and distortion during louder passages. My aim has been to minimise the effect of these and to try and round out the rather poor, one-dimensional sound of the originals.
The better sound is to be found in the Brahms, which has greater top-end frequency extension, and is without doubt the star performance here - it sounds remarkably well given its origins, with the full and rich orchestral sound coming across particularly well. A slight fuzziness in the piano's sound detracts little from a stunning overall effect.
The Schumann concerto, Furtwängler's only surviving recording of the piece, is perhaps less successful both as performance and recording, but is at least much cleaned up over previous issues.
Andrew Rose
Overview Furtwängler's Brahms 2nd Piano Concerto
Furtwängler conducted both Brahms piano concertos during all phases of his career, but there were nearly twice as many performances of the Second, the only one to have come down to us on records. There are two versions, both stemming from the war years and separated by thirteen months; each was given as part of a subscription concert by the Berlin Philharmonic. The soloist in the first was Edwin Fischer, and in the second, Adrian Aeschbacher, with whom Furtwängler collaborated on Beethoven's First Piano Concerto in Lucerne after the war.
As with their EMI studio recording of the Emperor Concerto, Furtwängler and Fischer are again as one. Theirs is a many-faceted account of a massive score, and like the music, the performance is symphonic and far-reaching in its dimensions. With this too there is "youthful" willingness on the part of Furtwängler and Fischer to give generously of themselves. The Second Concerto is a work that conductors and performers often even out, minimizing the sweep of the first and second movements so they are more in line with the reflective slow movement and the airy grace of the finale.
Not so with Furtwängler and Fischer. They follow where the music leads and appear to revel in its many planes of sound and its contrasting emotions. With this comes the sensation of an autumn tempest eventually playing itself out and leaving in its wake coolness and serenity. In harmony with their stormy approach to the opening movement, the allegro appassionato, while not notably faster than the norm, has a livelier impulse than usual and less a feeling of binding weight. Not surprisingly, the second-movement repeat is observed in both performances, for this is an instance where a repeat in Brahms is entirely organic. Though Fischer's beautifully textured playing permeates the slow movement with a blissful, nocturnal calm, some urgency is still felt, and it emerges openly in playful, Friska-like passages in the finale.
Aeschbacher makes less of a cohesive whole out of the music. His performance is not as well thought-out, and there are moments where he strikes out on his own in a direction different from that established by Furtwängler and the orchestra. He is, on the whole, technically more solid than Fischer, though Fischer can surprise one at times with unexpected prowess, as in the rising double thirds that come early in the last movement. With Fischer, every note sounds in tempo, while Aeschbacher glibly leaves notes out. In short, there is no choice here. One is an experience; the other is a performance.
John Ardoin The Furtwängler Record (Amadeus Press, 1994)
MP3 Sample Brahms 2nd Concerto, 3rd mvt
Listen
Download purchase links:
Ambient Stereo MP3
Mono 16-bit FLAC
Ambient Stereo 16-bit FLAC
Ambient Stereo 24-bit FLAC
CD purchase links and all other information:
PASC 347 - webpage at Pristine Classical
|
Franck's Symphony gets a brilliant delivery from Frenchman Paray
Fellow-countrymen Ibert, Ravel and Chabrier investigate musical influences beyond French borders
 PARAY
Franck, Ibert, Ravel, Chabrier
Recorded 1953/55
Producer and Audio Restoration Engineer: Andrew Rose
FRANCK Symphony in D minor
IBERT Escales ("Ports of Call")
RAVEL Rapsodie Espagnole
CHABRIER España - Rapsodie
Detroit Symphony Orchestra
Paul Paray conductor
Web page: PASC 346
Short notes
"A very good performance and recording indeed and there is almost nothing one wants to cavil at. Paray is ideally suited to the work, as one would expect, and in his admirable reading I only question one accelerando in the first movement...I would put it at the head of all earlier versions"
- Gramophone, 1957, on Paray's Franck Symphony
French conductor Paul Paray was lured to the US in the autumn of 1952 as principal conductor of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and almost immediately snapped up my Mercury Records for a series of superb recordings.
The first week of sessions yielded four long-playing albums-worth of music, including this excellent reading of Franck's Symphony. Two years and several recordings later Paray returned to his native French composers with a series of shorter works largely inspired by Spain, but also the rest of Europe beyond French borders. Together they make for an inspired release!
Notes on this recording
The transfers for this release came from the collection of Edward Johnson, to whom I am once more grateful. The Franck dates from Paray's first recording sessions for Mercury with the Detroit Symphony and were made in a busy week which yeilded some four LPs of release material - a remarkable and enthusiastic work rate for any orchestra and conductor! Paray of course excelled in French repertoire, and this is evident throughout this collection.
Mercury's sound, once XR-remastered, loses the boxiness of the Franck and over-emphasised mid-range of the rest, and remains good throughout, with superb extension both in the very deep bass (listen to the percussion in the Chabrier) and at the top end, though it is perhaps a little more hissy in the 1955 recordings than the 1953.
Great care has been taken in the pitching of the recordings and the elimination or reduction of wow and flutter. The 1953 LP was somewhat sharper than the concert pitch of the 1955 and this too has been fixed.
Andrew Rose
Review Franck Symphony in D minor
This is a very good performance and recording indeed and there is almost nothing one wants to cavil at. Paray is ideally suited to the work, as one would expect, and in his admirable reading I only question one accelerando in the first movement (after letter L in the score), simply because it is too short a passage and the accelerando seems to lead nowhere: and perhaps the slower wind interpolations in the middle movement (after letter 0) are rather overdone for a pia lento that need only be poco, as marked.
But these are the smallest things and any criticism of the recording is on the same scale, for the sound is outstandingly good. But as we swing into the main allegro of the first movement a loud hum hangs for a moment over the strings : and at the start of the middle movement one hears only the top note of each harp chord. (Perhaps this is not a matter of recording but as Paray meant it to sound. I still prefer to hear the chords.)
I cannot imagine that this record will disappoint anyone, for it is a finely judged performance, recorded with both clarity and warmth. I would put it at the head of all earlier versions. I must just advise the reader, however, that there is one much cheaper disc among those listed above, the 10-inch Philips ABR4048, and it is by no means to be overlooked. Its main defect is a very " empty hail" acoustic but that apart, its sound is good and Ormandy directs a sympathetic performance. I do far prefer both Paray and Mercury's sound-but it does cost more.
T.H. The Gramophone, June 1957
MP3 Sample Chabrier - España Listen
Download purchase links:
Ambient Stereo MP3
mono 16-bit FLAC
Ambient Stereo 16-bit FLAC
Ambient Stereo 24-bit FLAC
CD purchase links and all other information: PASC 346 - webpage at Pristine Classical
|
Backhaus plays J. S. Bach
 | | Wilhelm Backhaus |
PADA Exclusives
Streamed MP3s you can also download
Backhaus
Bach: Weinachts-Oratorium (Christmas Oratorio), BWV248 - Pastorale
Wilhelm Backhaus piano
HMV studio recording
6 November 1934
Abbey Road Studio 3
Cat. DB.2406
Matrix. 2EA.516
Transfer and Ambient Stereo processing by Dr. John Duffy
Further remastering by Andrew Rose
Over 500 PADA Exclusives recordings are available for high-quality streamed listening and free 224kbps MP3 download to all subscribers. PADA Exclusives are not available on CD and are additional to our main catalogue.
 Subscriptions start from €1 per week for PADA Exclusives only listening and download access. A full subscription to PADA Premium gets you all this plus unlimited streamed listening access to all Pristine Classical recordings for just €10 per month, with a free 1 week introductory trial.
|
|
