Pristine Audio: why do we do what we do?
Questions raised and questions answered
There's a slight switch around in the usual order to this week's column. First we have a thoughtful review from the new Fanfare magazine, reproduced in full. There then follows a short article in which I pick up on a couple of important comments made during the review's conclusion which raise questions about what we release and why, and what we aim to achieve generally. Then finally I've put together some additional notes on this week's new Furtwängler Beethoven release.
Read on and you'll see why I've juggled things around in this way:
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| Barbirolli's Elgar |
Fanfare Review
by Barnaby Rayfield
ELGAR
Symphony No. 2. Enigma Variations
John Barbirolli, cond; Hallé O
PRISTINE PASC 337 (79:38) Well, certainly nobody disputes the pedigree of these performances. Being British myself, I have always thought foreigners have the best way with Elgar, or at least they come into it with the least baggage and delusions of wallowing, Victorian nostalgia. I have always thought, and still do even after this new disc, that Georg Solti is the basic benchmark in Elgar's main works for orchestra, although life really isn't complete without Toscanini's Enigma Variations, or even Bernstein's deranged but, against my better judgment, revelatory Elgar disc on DG. All of them dust off the cobwebs. For many John Barbirolli is the quintessential "English" conductor, with his broad North Country accent and being a fixture amid the grimy, industrial Manchester music scene. But truthfully, Glorious John is just as Italian and a tourist as Toscanini was in Elgar, although their approaches are certainly very different.
What Pristine gives us here is Barbirolli's now rather overlooked first studio attempts at these favorite works of his. The Second Symphony was recorded for HMV in 1954 at the arse end of the mono era, whereas his first Enigma Variations is a rather trailblazing stereo experiment for Mercury/Pye, recorded only a year later. Barbirolli would in both cases get to remake them for EMI, but, as the notes rightly point out, these later and better-known versions from this gentle, affectionate musician would suffer from excessive lingering and wallowing tempi. In many ways this coupling of mono/stereo recordings represents the ultimate showcase for Pristine, whose raison d'être is Ultimate Sound Quality.
Anyone who only knows Barbirolli from his last EMI work will be caught unawares by the crusading fire of these performances. Remastered by Pristine in ambient stereo, this Second Symphony revels in its unruly, Straussian flair. Tempi are only a bit slower than Solti's fleet-footed Decca version, and although not as tidily played as Solti's, the Hallé orchestra sounds a damn sight less clinical. Sound is remarkable, not that the original mono as transferred on CD by EMI was unbearable. What Andrew Rose's remastering has done is not divide the sound, but instead give the whole sound a natural sense of space and air, seemingly without losing the detail and sonic impact of the original. I still feel a bit queasy about the term "ambient stereo" (bad memories of those botched fake stereos on '70s LPs), but in no sense does the sound feel lopsided or manipulated.
I do have a slight problem with this programming, though, as the structurally complex, impressionistic Second Symphony makes a rather messy introduction to the intricate, taut structure of the Enigma Variations. Or maybe it is because I just always prefer the confidence and form of the First Symphony. As the original Gramophone review, quoted in the notes, rightly points out, few people love each Elgar symphony equally.
Although deemed rather fast by original reviewers, Barbirolli's Enigma sounds warm, logical, and affectionate now. Playing is relatively tidy and, although it is not short of emotion, what comes across is Barbirolli's utter lack of artifice and cheapness. His "Nimrod" here is as sincere and soberly paced as his Mahler was. The phrasing is a delight, and only when compared to Toscanini's extraordinary, but for some, rushed 1935 reading does one notice a slight lack of fire and forward momentum. The stereo original, not surprisingly, needs less work done on the sound, and having briefly Spotified EMI's own transfer, it is clear that Rose has wisely not tinkered too much with what is already a vivid well-defined record.
What Pristine has achieved is really quite remarkable, giving real space yet definition to both works. Nevertheless, there is still part of me that wishes the brilliant Andrew Rose would devote his finite resources and undeniable skills to the real forgotten or unreleased recordings out there, rather than concentrate on performances most people will already have on the original company transfers. Improvements as these assuredly are, Pristine is essentially deviating from what the original company intended buyers to hear. If, however, you are unfortunate enough not to have heard Barbirolli's first Elgar, then yes, Pristine is your first choice.
[This review appears in Issue 36:2 (Nov/Dec 2012) of Fanfare Magazine.]I'd like to pick up on two points the reviewer makes here, both of which I think are important to discuss:
"There is still part of me that wishes the brilliant Andrew Rose would devote his finite resources and undeniable skills to the real forgotten or unreleased recordings out there, rather than concentrate on performances most people will already have on the original company transfers."
This is undoubtedly a position shared by a number of reviewers and collectors. It does, however, make a number of assumptions about what those who buy recordings from Pristine in general seem to want, and raises an additional question about our
raison d'être, more of which in my second response, below.
I love to be able to dig out rarities, find the recordings nobody's heard before or which have been lost to history, and bring them back into the catalogue. Unfortunately, and with only one notable exception, these rare recordings sell dismally badly - the demand is rarely there beyond a tiny handful of dedicated collectors of a specific artist. They're invariably the worst sellers we release - and if rarities was all we put out I'm afraid our business would soon collapse.
Thus we try to strike a balance between the well-known and the more obscure, helped in no small regard by the brilliant rare material Mark Obert-Thorn often finds, almost always garnering enthusiastic reviews, yet rarely making major impacts on the bottom line. It's a side of the business I'm enthusiastic about - but also realistic about; without a major nest-egg in the bank to support us we have to make sure we've enough to balance the books and pay our bills, which means we have to keep on bringing something worthwhile, quality-wise, to much-loved recordings too.
A case in point is perhaps our biggest seller of the year so far - Maria Callas's legendary
Tosca. It joins a long line of releases which have sold very well for us nd have been doing so for years, thank to multiple releases. It's releases like this which bring us the financial leeway to put out more unusual material, as well as providing joy to those who've always loved these classics and get to hear them as if newly minted. Which brings me to the second point:
"Improvements as these assuredly are, Pristine is essentially deviating from what the original company intended buyers to hear."
What did the "original company" (in this case, EMI and Pye/Mercury) really intend buyers to hear? I suggest they naturally aimed for the very best they could manage
with the technical resources available to them at the time. Any technical innovations sound engineers and record companies could put to good use were usually pretty quickly adopted (as well as a number of rather dubious ones from time to time too!).
As the e-mails I've received from the conductor Kenneth Alwyn to our remastering of his groundbreaking stereo 1812 Overture for Decca indicates, the original intentions were always to produce the best possible quality - yet if it can be bettered today with new technology, then this is very much a good thing. Those who would prefer to hear the original company's intentions are often able to track it down - it's easier than ever today to do this online if they don't already own the original LP.
I see our reason for existing, to a great extent, as bringing the very finest possible sound quality, using the very best technology and new techniques suddenly available to us thanks to the digital revolution of the last 10 years or so, to older recordings - some of them relatively unknown, some of them much-loved favourites. It's what I do - what I love to do - and the thrill of hearing a truly transformed recording for the first time, such as this week's Beethoven 8th, will surely never wear off. I'm happy that a lot of you feel the same way!
Yet as the major labels seem to be content now often to do little more than package up old transfers into ever bigger (and cheaper, it must be said) box sets, few are addressing the new possibilities for looking again at these classics, for which often huge improvements in sound quality are suddenly possible.
Pristine's reputation is built as much on the amazing sound quality we strive for (the review states that our "raison d'être is Ultimate Sound Quality"), as our ability to unearth forgotten or lost gems. For every best-selling Toscanini Bruckner 7 (the rarity that bucked the trend), there are numerous equally rare recordings we've issued that have barely scraped the low dozens in terms of sales, if that.
Enthusiastic critics may crave novelties and rarities, but the record-buying public often seems less convinced. I have here a lovely album of Juis Herrera de la Fuente conducting Mexican classical music, recorded for HMV in the 1950s, which I'd dearly love to release - and if I can find more of the same, enough to make up a full release, I will do so (there's only 38 minutes of it on the album). But I have to admit I've not tried that hard to find more of it, because I know it'll sell dismally, even though I personally quite like it!
Which leads, perhaps a little appropriately, onto this week's Furtwängler release, which I expect to be considerably more popular:
This week's new releaseI've been digging into John Ardoin's excellent book
The Furtwängler Record again this week to aid my recording selections in order to finally complete a set of Furtwängler's Beethoven symphonies, with the 6th and the 8th. They may be well-known recordings of well-known music, but that won't prevent them from being far more in demand than the aforementioned Mexican music recording!
Of the two, we start from a better place technically, with the "studio" recording of the Sixth. This was recorded by EMI in 1952, not in a recording studio, but in the Grosser Saal of the Musikverein in Vienna. I chose this over a highly-regarded 1954 performance with the Berlin Philharmonic (to which I hope to return in due course), partly because of the superior sound quality of the EMI recording, and partly because I wondered how much Ardoin's suggestion that the "immaculate" studio recording was "not as alive and vivacious" as the live recordings might be due to the sound quality of the original EMI issue. Certainly it sounds far more alive and vivacious now, in this new remastering, than it did before!
When dealing with live recordings, one is perpetually reminded of the presence of the audience and the nature of the performance, and I usually spend a lot of time excising coughs, sneezes, clunks and bangs, car noises and other extraneous non-musical content from these recordings. But listening to this recording of the sixth one is reminded just how much extraneous noise a full orchestra can make; what with squeaky chairs, clunky instruments to pick up and put down, pages to turn, and so on. This Sixth began with a particularly noisy creak drowning out the opening notes, which I've tamed - elsewhere I've reduced more of the "excess baggage", but I've deliberately not made it too "pristine" in this respect. We remain aware that there's a real orchestra full of real people wielding real, and often large instruments! It does sound tremendously open and alive - by comparison EMI's original has a wooden, boxiness to the sound, a lack of depth in the bass, and a hard, almost nasal quality to the mid-range.
Moving on, Mr. Ardoin makes the choice of
Symphony No. 8 very easy, as this quote quickly illustrates:
Of the three Eighths available, the earliest (Stockholm 1948) can be quickly discounted. The playing by the Stockholm Philharmonic is often clumsy and results more in a performance-in-the-making than the real thing. The Salzburg performance of 1954 with the Vienna Philharmonic, while less frantic and more finely etched, is also no match for the remarkable balance between rage and repose, the poise and the fleetness of the April 1953 performance with the Berlin Philharmonic. In Berlin, there was a greater warmth in the strings, more of a feeling of dialogue between strings and woodwinds, and sforzandos and fortissimo s are less explosive; the Eighth, after all, is not the Third or Fifth.
Here there was a far greater challenge in the remastering of a live recording that was hard, boomy, and frankly, tiring on the ears. Happily this was a product of the poor frequency accuracy of the microphone(s), something which turned out to be surprisingly easy to rectify. The tape recorders in Berlin had done a very good job of capturing everything they were sent, allowing a reconstruction of something that sounds far more like their Philharmonic Orchestra than heard previously in this recording! There's real depth and clarity here now, and that previous boominess now sounds more like natural reverberation and rather full-bodied bass.
All too often Beethoven's even-numbered symphonies get put into second place behind the 3rd, 5th, 7th and 9th. Listening to them again, in such unprecedented sound quality under the baton of Furtwängler, one is quickly forced to admit just how good Beethoven can be when performed like this. Both symphonies here are absolutely exquisite!
Andrew Rose
12 October 2012
