MusicWeb Reviewer’s Log July/August 2008
Reviewer: Patrick C Waller
The move towards
downloading seems to be gathering pace. After some discussions
about how to present download reviews on MusicWeb, a useful
conspectus of downloadable Bach
has recently been published. I have continued to dip an occasional
toe in the water, mainly in search of material otherwise not
available or which is particularly good value if downloaded.
One example which fulfils both these criteria is Sir Adrian
Boult’s 1950s LPO Brahms symphony cycle on Classicsonline the whole
of which, including the usual fillers, costs under £8. In my
view this compares well with his 1970s EMI cycle although Janet
Baker in the later version of the Alto Rhapsody is peerless.
I also downloaded Giulini’s VPO version of Bruckner’s
9th Symphony for a mere £1.99 from Classic and
Jazz and was interested to note the disappearance of Digital
Rights Management restrictions since I had last visited this
site. A major issue for anyone interested in downloading is
price and I continue to be baffled by much of what I have seen
in this respect. The Giulini mentioned above was one of four
versions of Bruckner’s 9th on offer at the same low
price – and much the most desirable I suspect – but it wasn’t
obviously a special offer or part of a general pricing structure,
as I could find virtually nothing else that cheap. Perhaps it
was a mistake, so if the deal appeals to you, I’d get there
quick!
The general problem
with downloaded classical music seems to be that the platform
was not designed for it. As a small part of the market, it would
perhaps be unrealistic to expect that but I do feel that much
more thought could have gone into presenting classical music
for download sensibly. Among the nonsenses I have seen are whole
discs costing more than the parts added together, a track’s
worth of applause downloadable for 79p and full price releases
put alongside cheaper re-issues, representing unnecessary confusion
and duplication. Quite a few sites provide next to no documentation
and sometimes it is quite hard to establish the likely sound
quality i.e. the bit rate for the individual disc is not quoted
but is variable across the site. I would therefore suggest that,
having got up and running by slamming stuff on quickly, download
sites step back for a moment and improve the presentation of
what’s there as well as adding to it.
Probably the best
download site this at the moment is the Chandos Classical
Shop and from there I downloaded the remarkable 1935 recording
of Wagner’s Die
Walküre Act I conducted by Bruno Walter for £4.80 in
amazingly good (320 kbits/sec) sound as remastered by Andrew
Rose of Pristine
Classical. At least Chandos are trying to address one of
the problems with downloading – continuity across tracks – by
offering a single continuous file option. However, I am not
convinced it is completely successful in this case – there are
still slight audible blips. It is the singing of Lotte Lehmann,
Lauritz Melchior and Emanuel List that makes this recording
unmissable – what a pity the whole work wasn’t recorded. I have
been listening to quite a lot of Wagner recently via a large
bargain box of Bayreuth recordings issued on Decca 4780279 –
some 33 CDs at a little more than £1 a pop. Since most of my
Wagner collection emanates from the studio, this seemed an ideal
way of hearing the fabled Bayreuth sound in recordings made
in the 60s, 70s and 80s. The centrepiece is Böhm’s Ring
from 1966-7 which I enjoyed very much. If the very opening sounds
a little unpromising, there were few disappointments thereafter
in dramatic and well-sung readings. Windgassen only just made
the end of Siegfried before his voice gave out but I
suppose that is forgivable and his Tristan was impressive –
also alongside Birgit Nilsson at her finest and conducted by
Böhm in 1966. The early operas are from the 60s and conducted
with a fairly light touch by Sawallisch. Meistersinger
is the 1974 performance under Varviso and Parsifal the
most recent – 1985 – under Levine. The latter is well-known
for his leisurely approach to this work but I enjoyed it more
than I expected to. These discs are nicely presented with plots
synopses but there a couple of irritating errors - Rheingold
and Siegfried are said to date from 1971 but a little
discussion on the Bulletin Board
soon established 1966 as the correct date.
The other large
box – some 16 CDs – that I have been working through is Evgeny
Svetlanov’s Miaskovsky recordings issued as part
of Warner’s Svetlanov edition (volume 35 – 2564696898). Off
the top of my head, I can only think of a few composers who
wrote more symphonies than Miaskovsky’s twenty-seven (Haydn,
Sammartini, Hovhaness, Mozart and Brian) and it’s a powerful
series that few people can have heard in its entirety until
now. Particularly favourites are numbers 21 and 22, both in
single span, but within an idiom which progressed little over
40 odd years, the composer found endless variations of form
and mood. Svetlanov is totally inside the music, the orchestral
playing and recordings are consistently good. A few were made
quite a long time ago but most are digital. Again, there has
been relevant discussion on the Bulletin Board,
pointing up in particular the inadequacies of the documentation.
For anyone who had collected the incomplete Olympia set, the
Alto completions will be a must because they are well-documented.
For anyone new or fairly new to the composer – I knew about
four of the symphonies before hearing this set – this box is
the only realistic way forward and it is reasonably priced at
less than £3 per disc. In lieu of what should be in the box,
one can find out about the composer and his music through a
survey
and various reviews of these performances on MusicWeb
and a website
dedicated to the composer.
Back in March I
attended the premiere of Maurice Blower’s Symphony
in C, a work which lay for years in a loft before being found
by the composer son and recreated using Sibelius software. The
performance by the Havant Symphony Orchestra was creditable
indeed and can now be heard on a CD available from the orchestra’s
website.
I was also pleased
to discover some chamber music by Hovhaness in
a second hand shop – the string quartets played by the Shanghai
Quartet. This Delos disc was reviewed
on MusicWeb in 2000 and appears to be still available.
Otherwise most of
my listening has been through the Naxos
Music Library although for about a week or so the sound
quality deteriorated quite markedly. Eventually I realised that
the player was streaming at 20k when it should have been 64k.
For me this is the difference between tolerable listening and
purgatory. I contacted their technical support and also established
that my colleague David Barker in Australia was having the same
problem. Eventually, I think it was David who helped Naxos sort
it out by noticing that there was a extra “0” in the URL and
that it could be abolished and 64k sound restored by switching
to 20k sound and then back to 64k. Once that had been conveyed
to Naxos normal service was resumed very quickly and I was able
to hear properly the two symphonies of Italian composer Sergio
Rendine (8.572039) – attractive works written
in the last few years which I had been using in the testing
process and not enjoying hearing in execrable 20k sound. Off
copyright material of interest continues to appear in the “Naxos
Classical Archives” – these are not available on CD but, in
addition to being streamable, some are being made available
for download on Classicsonline. Amongst
the recent additions are the Danish Radio recordings of Nielsen’s
symphonies from the 1950s under Jensen, Tuxen and Grøndahl.
I have some of these in their previous Dutton incarnations and
they are wonderful indeed. Hopefully they will be downloadable
soon so I can complete the set. Also on my future listening
agenda is the music of Siegfried Wagner – the
library contains several CPO discs of his (see review)
- my interest being fanned by an excellent article recently
published in International Record Review.
Finally, the Proms
are now with us and, although I haven’t heard as much as I would
wish on the radio, the listen again facility via the BBCi player
is proving useful. One concert I did catch most of and enjoy
had Yevgeny Sudbin playing Rachmaninov’s First
Piano Concerto under Yan Pascal Tortelier followed by Vaughan
Williams’s Fourth Symphony. I turned on just as the
opening work – the first public performance of Bax’s In
Memoriam – was concluding and kept meaning to go back and
hear it all. When I eventually did so it was at about 8 o’clock
one evening and the iPlayer indicated that it would be removed
at 8.22 that evening! I’m glad I didn’t leave it any later and
will be seeking out Vernon Handley’s Chandos recording (CHAN9715)
so as to hear it again.
Patrick C Waller
