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Pristine News: Friday 8th January, 2010
New
to Pristine Classical? Get Started Here:
A Beginner's Guide to Downloading - Five ways to find recordings at Pristine Classical - Full printable Pristine Audio catalogue New release today: BEETHOVEN Symphonies 1 & 2 - MOZART - Symphony 35 'Haffner' Pristine Audio PASC 209 Transfers
by Edward Johnson from his private collection Total
duration: 72:49
Three superb stereo Mercury Living Presence
recordings Paray
and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra on top form again Detroit Symphony Orchestra More Paray Detroit SO Beethoven: Paul Paray's Beethoven recordings were somewhat underrated in their day - his recording of the Symphony No. 6 was derided in reviews of the mid-fifties for its style and, in particular, speed - even though the conductor was sticking to the composer's own metronome markings. Yet modern tastes seem to have caught up with Paray - his recording of the 7th Symphony, issued here a few weeks ago, was recently hailed by BBC Radio 3's Rob Cowan as "one of the most thrilling performances...ever recorded". Here we present the only three stereo recordings Paray made for Mercury that they have yet to reissue. Again the combination of Living Presence recordings and Pristine's XR remastering makes for a winning sonic combination, and again we think there's some serious reappraisal of these performances to be made: we think you'll agree they're well worth hearing again.
Notes
on the recordings: These
three recordings constitute the only stereo Mercury Living Sound
recordings made by Paul Paray with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra that
Mercury themselves have not reissued on CD. Their reasons for not doing
so, along with other inexplicable omissions from Paray's mono
recordings, remain unknown and hard to understand - although Paray is
more commonly associated with French composers, yet again he is superb
both with Beethoven and Mozart. From
a technical point of view the later recording was clearly superior to
the earlier one. The levels of tape hiss on the 1956 Mozart required
considerably more noise reduction to tame, and the top end was not as
clear or bright as the two 1959 Beethoven recordings. In fact, if
anything, the latter were overly bright, as is often the case with
Mercury's 1950s Living Presence recordings, and taming this had the
happy side-effect of reducing overall hiss levels to something far more
acceptable. In
all cases disc surface noise was minimal. Both 1956 and 1959 recordings
did however suffer from a degree of induced main hum, something quickly
and precisely dealt with in audio restoration these days. Both also
suffered from occasional tape drop-outs on one or other channel, which
is also been cured. The Mozart does remain the slightly noisier of the
two, but neither suffers from hiss or noise to an extent which should
prove an annoyance at any reasonable listening volumes, and the
Beethoven Symphonies in particular would stand comparison to almost any
recordings made in the analogue era - after all, Mercury were very good
indeed at what they did when making Living Presence LPs, as their
long-lasting reputation for superior recordings repeatedly suggests. Andrew
Rose
Pristine highlights - this week from 2007: Toscanini conducts Wagner Pristine Audio PASC 078
Toscanini
is utterly magnificent in Wagner Another
look at a classic Pristine transfer from 2007
This is the recording which led Alex Ross, music critic
of the New
Yorker, to write last summer: "...the
gain is substantial. In the case of the Toscanini broadcast, Rose has
pushed the old tape past the border at which an artifact becomes a
living document. Hooked on the sensation, I spent days browsing
Pristine’s archives..."
Download
listening sample:
(Tristan und Isolde, Prelude, (excerpt))Restorer's
notes: This recording, transcribed from acetate discs of
unusually high quality, presents a truly remarkable document of
Toscanini's mid-40's conducting, perhaps all the more so for being an
all-Wagner concert, broadcast at the height of World War II. It
responded excellently to the tonal rebalancing inherent in the XR
process, bringing out a full-frequency tonal response, and my main work
was in dealing with occasional radio interference and, at times,
unpleasant surface noise. I'm pleased to report that these have been
either eradicated or reduced to the extent that they no longer
interrupt the listener as had previously been the case. I suspect these
interruptions, which only the latest computer software is capable of
succesfully tackling, may constitute one good reason why this excellent
concert has not been heard in public since its first broadcast some 64
years ago.
New
MP3 transfers at PADA Exclusives
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Latest
Reviews, e-mails & comments
"Just
to say thank you.
I have downloaded Kind of Blue as a 24Bit XR FLAC file and compared it to my recently acquired Columbia CD. Wow! What a difference! Superb. As enjoyable as the Adrian Boult English Music last month. Please keep them coming." - N.C. - - 00 - - "As you probably know, the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, the largest library system in the world, along with collecting and safeguarding America’s written and printed history, is also devoted to gathering and preserving its moving image, musical and recorded sound heritage as well. As part of the Library’s preservation activities, every year the Librarian of Congress, on the recommendation of the National Recording Preservation Board, publishes a list of recordings deemed to be “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” These recordings are then earmarked for preservation in the Library of Congress, specifically at the LC’s Culpeper facility. You can learn more at: http://www.loc.gov/rr/record/nrpb/ In 2005, Toscanini’s 1938 broadcast of “Adagio for Strings” was one of the recordings named to the National Sound Registry that year. However, a thorough review of our holdings—though vast—has determined that a copy of this work is not currently in our Collections. Since you currently have this recording in your inventory/catalog, I am writing to see if one or two copies (one for “deep storage,” one for “daily use) of the work could be donated to the Library of Congress..." - US Library of Congress. - - 00 - - "The Parker/Gillespie concert sounds great, and the Miles Davis album is a revelation. Thanks!" - D.K. - - 00 - - "An exciting batch of vintage American recordings has arrived from Pristine Audio: Eugene Ormandy's 1955 Rite of Spring burning brightest as 'The Adoration of the Earth' unfolds, a truly riveting performance (the couplings are a so-so Petrushka Suite and some striking Rachmaninov-Cailliet Preludes). I was delighted to see an all-Respighi programme from the Minneapolis Symphony under Antal Dorati, climaxing with Church Windows, the closing 'St. Gregory the Great' barely containable on CD let alone LP! Mind you, Dorati's Roman Festivals isn't half bad and The Fountains of Rome is very sensitively conducted. This is Dorati at his best and the transfers are about as good as you could expect without access to mastertapes. One hopes that there is more Dorati / Minneapolis material en route. Pristine CDs devoted to Morton Gould, Carmen Dragon and Felix Slatkin include a Slatkin / Concert Arts Orchestra programme of Carnival of the Animals, Ibert's Divertissement, and a Delius programme that has seen some snooty reviews over the years but includes much extremely sensitive playing, notably from the cellist Eleanor Aller in the Caprice and Elegy. Maybe this is Delius sounding like period soundtrack music but what's wrong with that? Many a music addict has been weaned on heart-tugging film scores, often involving standard repertoire on a working holiday. Don't knock it. Again the transfers work extremely well." - Rob Cowan, Gramophone, February 2010
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