# The problem with listening to classical music...



## mac (Jan 28, 2018)

...is finding well recorded examples. I've just been through a dozen versions of Holsts Planets for example, and they vary from brilliant, to sounding like they're played on a casio in a shoe box.

Who's seen as the go-to for audiophile standard classical recordings?


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## ptram (Jan 28, 2018)

My collection of CDs sounds nearly always very well, as did the LPs. I would guess that YouTube's compression is more conceived for hip-hop, and makes classical music sound like sh*t. And most free classical music we listen is found on YT.

Paolo


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## mac (Jan 28, 2018)

ptram said:


> My collection of CDs sounds nearly always very well, as did the LPs. I would guess that YouTube's compression is more conceived for hip-hop, and makes classical music sound like sh*t. And most free classical music we listen is found on YT.
> 
> Paolo



Thanks, but I'm using spotify and tidal at their highest quality. This way its easy to switch between the different releases and compare directly.


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## Zhao Shen (Jan 28, 2018)

mac said:


> Thanks, but I'm using spotify and tidal at their highest quality. This way its easy to switch between the different releases and compare directly.



The oldest recordings often sound meh, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a recording in the past 10-20 years that's awful sound quality.The London Symphony Orchestra in particular has a bunch of really nice recordings. Though for Holst specifically, this recording has a special place in my heart.


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## TGV (Jan 28, 2018)

Good recordings are made by good orchestras: RCO, BPO, VPO, etc. Also, recordings by Deutsche Grammophon in the period 1970-2000 almost always sound good. Other labels and orchestras can be hit and miss. E.g., BIS and Naxos are more budget labels and have many dull sounding recordings.


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## Wunderhorn (Jun 17, 2018)

At least in recent years (since after 2000) I have not had anything problematic sounding by BIS. Some of the best sonics I had from Chandos and also Pentatone, Toccata, Capriccio, CPO, have great sound as well. Even Naxos has improved a lot compared to the early/mid 90s.
Do yourself a favor and instead of streaming buy the surround flacs of some favorites (If you have a surround sound system).
That will add even more dimension to your sound experience.


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## Sami (Jun 18, 2018)

I think it's important to not let this deter from the appreciation of the music though. Some historical recordings are extremely valuable and enjoyable, even though they are technically sub-par. In a way it's like listening to Horowitz play in the later years, half the notes are wrong, but the overall effect is still worth at least one listen in a lifetime.


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## chimuelo (Jun 18, 2018)

mac said:


> ...is finding well recorded examples. I've just been through a dozen versions of Holsts Planets for example, and they vary from brilliant, to sounding like they're played on a casio in a shoe box.
> 
> Who's seen as the go-to for audiophile standard classical recordings?



Try Isao Tomitas recordings done on Modular Synths and a Melotron.
Snowflakes Are Dancing by Debussy is my personal favorite, but the Planets was equally impressive.

I agree recordings of great performances could be better.
I find Cleveland’s Symphonic recordings are usually so good you can hear clacking of bows slight coughs etc. particularly George Szell as Conductor.


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## rayinstirling (Jun 18, 2018)

Have you considered the influence a conductor has on the performance of any orchestral music?
It’s their interpretation you’re listening to on any recording.


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## MarcusD (Jun 18, 2018)

The conductor has more influence over the listening experience rather than the quality of the recording.

Favourite version of The Planets is with Charles Dutoit and the Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal


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## re-peat (Jun 19, 2018)

rayinstirling said:


> It’s their interpretation you’re listening to on any recording.





MarcusD said:


> The conductor has more influence over the listening experience rather than the quality of the recording.


.
I don't think that's entirely true. Engineer(s) and producer have a huge impact on the way a performance translates to a recording (and thus to our ears), an impact that is also almost completely beyond the control of the conductor.

It's something that fascinates me quite a bit, actually: to which extent the nature and characteristics of a recording can enhance, or be in conflict with, a conductor’s idea of how a piece of music should be performed, and how it should sound.
And how much the recording itself becomes actually a *very* important musical element (timbrally, dynamically, emotionally, spatially), next to what’s contained in the actual notes and the way a conductor and his players interpret/perform these notes.

I happen to be a mad collector of recorded Petrushka’s (the Stravinsky ballet, I mean) and there’s this dance in the second part of the ballet, called “Dance of the Coachmen”, the communication and impact of which, I've come to learn, relies not only on how the conductor wants to hear it and how well the orchestra plays it, but at least as much on how the music is recorded (something which neither the composer nor the conductor has much control over): whether the brass are balanced just right — and it *has* to be just right —, whether the percussion is present enough (but not too present), whether the dynamic range is big enough, whether the low end of the orchestra has enough space to do its thing, whether all the scintillating detail is captured adequately or not, whether the pulse of the dance is strong enough … and countless other *very* important elements which, if judged right, combine into making this dance an irresistble stampede of orchestral splendour but which, if for some reason not balanced right (or recorded poorly), make for a very frustrating listening experience even if the music is performed well.

And believe me, what applies to Petrushka, applies to the entire classical repertoire. Even to recordings of chamber music and solo works. Compare, for example, recordings of the Goldberg Variations (for modern piano). If a piano is recorded from too big a distance, in too reverberant a space, resulting in a recorded sound that is wooly, unclear and diffused, the piano player may be the best in the world giving a once-in-a-lifetime performance, but the recorded result will still somehow be a document of debatable musical appeal and interest. (I discussed this once with someone from Warner, after having bought Nicolas Angelich's Goldberg, which to my ears suffers from being poorly recorded, but that person, sadly, didn't seem to be as interested in any of this as I am.)

Anyway, more on topic: I don't think one a can generalize about certain labels having a uniformely good sound, and others not. Deutsche Gramophon, Chandos, Naïve, BIS, Warner, EMI, Naxos, Decca, Harmonia Mundi, and all the others ... I have many albums of all of these labels and some sound great while others simply sound not good at all. Even a label like Linn that started out catering for the audiophile, has today a catalog that is tainted by recordings which aren't quite up to their original standard.
In my experience, it's often the smaller 'niche' labels that succeed better in maintaining high-quality recording standards. The French label Timpani is a good example. But they have a small catalog of rather specific (and mostly French) repertoire. No Holst, in other words.

_


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## muk (Jun 19, 2018)

re-peat said:


> Engineer(s) and producer have a huge impact on the way a performance translates to a recording (and thus to our ears), an impact that is also almost completely beyond the control of the conductor.



There is one recent recording that makes me question the last part of that phrase: the recording of Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto and Stravinsky's Les Noces with Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Teodor Currentzis, and Musica Aeterna, released on Sony Classical.



The engineering is so starkly different here from the norms of classical recordings. The micing must have been very close up, and there is very little reverb. It enhances the intimacy of the quiet passages, whereas the louder passages are like explosions. It is very much Currentzis's approach to overstate such contrasts. And I can not imagine that he wouldn't have had his say in how precisely this cd had to be recorded and engineered.


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## re-peat (Jun 19, 2018)

I have that album, Muk, and it’s something special indeed. Can’t listen to it casualy though, because if you’re not paying ceaseless careful attention, half of that album passes by near-inaudible — the ppp bits are *very* silent — as a result of the dynamic range being as big as it is.

And yes, that album is a good example of a session where the conductor and the production team would, I assume, have gotten together prior to the recording to discuss how the project is to be approached, and I suppose the conductor had a lot of say in determining how things needed to be set up and recorded. You're quite right.
But that’s a fairly isolated exception, it seems to me, if my rather huge record collection is anything to go by. More often, I imagine, the conductor and the orchestra come in to do their thing, focusing near-exclusively on the performance of the music, and rely on the production staff to record it as professionaly and transparently as is technically possible. Some conductors/performers will no doubt express certain preferences as to how they like to be recorded, and there may occur some exchange of opinions, but in the end, much of the responsibility for how things end up sounding lies mostly with the engineering and production staff, it seems to me.

I have supposedly high-end recordings of Chailly with the Leipzig Gewandhaus, and of Saval with Le Concert des Nations (to name just two that spring to mind) that are brickwalled to death. Can’t imagine the conductor had any say in that.

Also: if you listen, for example, to the recorded sound of, say, Rattle, Haitink, Abbado or just about any other conductor throughout their careers, there is a huge difference (spatially, dynamically, tonally) to how these people have been recorded, leading me to believe that that aspect of their recording sessions was never the prime consideration on their mind. There's simply no sonic consistency there (as an artistic choice, I mean) to assume otherwise.

Or check and compare various recent-ish versions (and there are many to choose from) of the Beethoven symphonies, and listen to the enormous differences in the presence of the timpani. You’ll hear that it’s a difference that goes far beyond the choice of instrument and sticks, the vision and chosen balance decided on by the conductor or the musical intelligence of the timpanist. It’s a difference that is equally the result of how the orchestra was recorded. As artisanal and un-lofty a technical matter as that, yes. But it has a tremendous impact on how we evaluate the performance. And that’s just the timpani.

_


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## Light and Sound (Jun 19, 2018)

While naturally it all comes down to taste, when it comes to classical I don't think you can beat anything recorded by those taught by or employed by Keith O. Johnsons label (reference recordings). Look for anything with the recording lable:






Example:


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## SergeD (Jun 19, 2018)

MarcusD said:


> Favourite version of The Planets is with Charles Dutoit and the Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal



I love that one, very lush, but I also learned from the recorded 1926, 1937 Naxos historical version which sounds terrible according to nowadays standards.

Mac, beware , if you listen to that latter and say Eurk! then you may be a listener instead of a composer. The raw acoustic version of the beautiful Strawberry Fields Forever on the Beatles Anthology collection is also a good test to know on which side you stand.


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## JohnG (Jun 19, 2018)

Light and Sound said:


> While naturally it all comes down to taste, when it comes to classical I don't think you can beat anything recorded by those taught by or employed by Keith O. Johnsons label (reference recordings).



That is interesting. I think he was the engineer for the original EWQLSO, which in one interesting respect has yet to be surpassed. That aspect is that, whenever I used EWQLSO as my mockup basis, I was never "surprised" by the live recording that replaced it. Somehow those mockups produced unerringly accurate predictions of blend, the level of "strain" you hear in the performance (like the brass).

I do think that some of the more recent libraries sound better if you are trying to use them for the final version -- not replacing the fake orchestra with real players -- but Mr. Johnson captured some very good stuff there if you're using it as a sketching tool for music that will be performed live.


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