tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8060605.post859620672642417871..comments2024-03-15T20:32:39.815+00:00Comments on On An Overgrown Path: Should we change the way classical audiences listen?Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8060605.post-19096870918142644872016-08-18T13:37:58.919+01:002016-08-18T13:37:58.919+01:00an afterthought about interpretation:
Catching up ...an afterthought about interpretation:<br />Catching up with another Prom, the Aurora orchestra's which a friend had enthused about, I was a little surprised by the reading of the Strauss oboe concerto, finding the orchestra's playing 'rather cut up into chunks' I noted in an email to him. But now I wonder if they were playing like this to counter the Royal Albert Hall's generous acoustic and the BBC seriously misrepresented them by almost completely eliminating it in the very close sound picture they provided. Does a similar sonic contradiction explain their rather raucous Jupiter symphony (where the subtlety of Abbado's version with the Orchestra Mozart is much closer to my ideal)? It would be interesting to know what people who attended the concert think of the transmitted sound - even more so to hear from the musicians.iarfulhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18077717082120626887noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8060605.post-22133701815839237482016-08-16T03:30:01.725+01:002016-08-16T03:30:01.725+01:00Thank you very much for your response to my commen...Thank you very much for your response to my comment. You have sharpened my argument by your presentation, and also widened the debate. I concur completely with your description of the earlier Proms sound. It struck me most forcefully a couple of years ago when, in comparing interpretations of the piano part in Oiseaux Exotiques, I pulled out a cassette of a Proms performance from 1995. More recent than your examples it nevertheless caused me to email a friend in the industry: ".. the sound picture .. is VERY different from the Proms sound of today - much more resonant, more sense of space or more particularly depth. ... less 'precise' perhaps, certainly less 'clinical' but much more convincing, and with far more of a sense of the hall." (and I was not even listening on my best system)<br /><br />Whilst a case could be made for engineering a CD to give an experience very different from that enjoyed by a typical audience member if this allows a better insight into the work(s) - even though my caveat about the necessity of a properly 'transparent' sound would still apply, surely the point of broadcasting a concert is to 'transport' the listener at home to the hall. When the hall acoustic was provided by a main stereo pair, just hearing the audience noise behind the announcer's voice as we 'went over' to the Festival Hall or wherever it was created the same sort of anticipation one feels when attending a concert. I do not experience that frisson with a Radio 3 relay today.<br /><br />You also focus on the very serious question of 'the art of listening'. The kind of programmes you mention will certainly have helped develop mine, but their impact resulted not just from the uniquely gifted individuals concerned but also from the much narrower range of electronic media then available. I am not sure it can be reproduced in 2016. Today online courses such as Jonathan Biss's lectures 'Exploring Beethoven's Piano Sonatas' offer more extended explorations in a more permanent form, a tremendous democratisation of learning which the internet makes possible; but the numbers are not comparable: I see a Gramophone article of July 2013 remarked on the fact that 19,500 people had already signed up to Mr Biss's lectures. And he was certainly lecturing 'to the converted'. So you are right, the BBC still has a vital role to play here - but first it would have to find today's Antony Hopkins or David Munrow, and then that person would have to want to devote a significant part of their time to broadcasting. Maybe the answer will be through the greater diffusion of the actions already undertaken by musicians such as Mr Biss or Nicola Benedetti (and one can think of many others) who will rightly want to continue to devote most of their time to playing.<br /><br />Marc A Meldon's remarks on the delights of his Decca Mono box also find a resonance in my own recent experience. A day or two after the discussion I mentioned, a friend who had been rediscovering her LPs brought out a 1951 Westminster recording of Beethoven's 4th piano concerto by Paul Badura-Skoda and the Vienna Staatsoper under Scherchen. Mono of course and with occasionally noisy surfaces, it had a fresh, detailed sound and a spontaneity of execution that were captivating and seemed to come from another world. As Mark says, a real performance and more 'natural'. According to Wikipedia's article on the Westminster label, "its slogan was "natural balance", referring to its single microphone technique". <br /><br />Are we collectively rediscovering some fundamental and simple (if occasionally inconvenient) truths about recording and performance? Mark praises the products of BIS and Harmonia Mundi; they are companies, it seems to me, where musical values have always been paramount, and this is as apparent in the quality of their sound as in the soundness of their A&R decisions. DG's recent choices seem to reflect very different values and priorities.iarfulhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18077717082120626887noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8060605.post-25773483192919927822016-08-15T17:14:44.849+01:002016-08-15T17:14:44.849+01:00Very interesting! Why is it, I wonder, that my 53-...Very interesting! Why is it, I wonder, that my 53-year old ears have been thrilled by listening to the first few discs of the Decca Mono Sound box set that arrived at my home courtesy of the River People for £50 yesterday? Further exploration of late mono recordings and other, much older, recordings of broadcasts from the likes of Bruno Walter, Wilhelm Furtwangler, Hans Knappertsbusch, from labels like the much-missed Tahra www.tahra.com and Music & Arts has brought the realisation of two important, but perhaps obvious, things.<br /><br />Firstly, these broadcasts, interpretive quirks and sonic imperfections notwithstanding, are of real performances, not digital reconstructions mad in the editing suite of a studio by one or two sets of ears.<br /><br />Secondly, they just sound more natural to me. I have a copy of the Mercury Living Presence Mussorgsky Pictures at an Exhibition and Bartok Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Rafael Kubelik in late mono (hard to find nowadays, unfortunately) and it sound great, with back/front depth. There are many other recordings made in the late 1950s that are as good.<br /><br />I was recently at a friend's and the Bob Dylan Mono masters of his 1960s albums sounded far better than the "mixed for mono" overly-wide stereo releases, as did some Miles Davis discs.<br /><br />On the other hand, most of the few SACDs I own sound very natural in two-channel sound through a recently acquired Denon CD/SACD player; I'm thinking here of discs from BIS, Harmonia Mundi and various small German labels. It's such a shame that SACD is seemingly a vanishing format.<br /><br />Many CDs released in the "Great CD Rush" of 1984-1999 sound terrible and I agree with the other comment here about the truly dreadful "4D" recordings issued in the 1990s by Deutsche Grammophon, in particular.<br /><br />Don't even get me started on the often weird "surround sound" 5.1 SACDs that I have heard - almost without exception I much preferred the two-channel offering.<br /><br />Finally, whilst to me sound quality is terribly important, despite my 53-year old ears, this can only be a subjective response in an individual sense; it's hard to be objective IMHO.<br /><br />Back to mono anyone?<br /><br />Best.MarkAMeldonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09635592193850567632noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8060605.post-43069581264948102942016-08-15T14:24:03.093+01:002016-08-15T14:24:03.093+01:00John Mclaughlin Williams comments on Facebook - &#...John Mclaughlin Williams comments on Facebook - 'This is an overdue discussion of expectations perhaps "corrupted" by recordings, and how real music in real halls actually sounds. I've often been annoyed by the unnatural balances in classical recordings. DG is an awful perpetrator in this regard; it's like every record they put out is a fantasy.'Pliablehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10616598845886342325noreply@blogger.com