Sir Thomas Beecham

In this week's newsletter:

• New this week - Beecham's magnificent 1937/8 Berlin Zauberflöte brought to new life
  
• New this week - Lotte Lehmann sings Schumann - Bruno Walter plays the piano!
  
• Editorial - The Joy of Cloning
  
• PADA - Parts Seven and Eight of The History of the Cello
  
• Recent Reviews:
  Krauss's 1953 Götterdämmerung
  - "A splendid achievement, then, is this Pristine Audio “Ring”..."
  

---

Our new sales support e-mail addresses:

For CD orders: cdsupport@pristineclassical.com

For download orders: downloadsupport@pristineclassical.com

 

---

Editorial - The Joy of Cloning

I received a number of e-mails following my editorial last week, and there's one point I realise I neglected to make and which I'll return to at the end of this editorial. However, one particular question was raised, and it's one I've seen asked before – it's all about how secure a music collection is when we abandon hard copies in favour of hard drives.

Since the beginning of the era of recorded sound, we've been used to a recording being something precious, something special. Not only is the music and performance a part of this, but also the medium on which it is carried. For decades we've taken great care of our discs and tapes to ensure their survival, and with them, the survival of the delicate signals held upon them.

There can surely be nobody reading this who has never had at least one calamity happen to a recording in their possession. Whether it's the cracking or snapping of a shellac 78, the scratching of a vinyl disc, the tangling or accidental erasing of a tape or the bronzing or scratching of a CD, we've been used to living with music collections which are inherently fragile to one degree or another for as long as we've all been alive.

Well that's just changed, and it's changed forever. Those days are behind me, never to be revisited. But I haven't perfected the indestructible CD-R nor the shock-proof hard drive, the blast-proof magnetic tape nor the waterproof iPod.

No, I have (at least) two record collections, and each is a perfect clone of the other. Imagine if you'd bought a spare copy of every record, CD, VHS tape and DVD you ever owned, not to mention books, photographs and just about everything else which now exists in the digital domain. Imagine then if one copy of each went up in smoke; you're left with a spare copy – nothing is entirely lost. But should anything happen to the spare? You can't be too careful, can you...

In this new, digital century, these worries become increasingly a thing of the past. I've no need to make lots of back-up copies of my documents or media onto a stack of floppy discs, CDs or even DVDs – it would take an age and cost a fortune anyway – when the cost of hard drive storage required to hold the lot is rapidly falling towards €100 and the copying required can take place unattended in the click of a mouse. And in a very few years' time I'll look back and laugh at how slow, expensive and limited my digital storage was way back in 2010!

Don't forget, this isn't just copying as we once knew it. Every time we copied an LP to cassette or a CD to open reel tape, whatever the specs of the machinery involved, in the analogue world we were always going to cause some signal degradation; even the finest Studer tape recorders had wow and flutter that could be measured, a noise floor defined by the tape type and speed used, and needed careful and regular calibration and cleaning to get the best results.

By contrast, the sons, grandsons, great-grandsons ad infinitum of my original digital music files (and my own digital recordings date back to the 1980s and some very obsolete tape formats) suffer none of this. Each copy is identical, each a perfect clone of its original, each back-up a copy created automatically without need for human intervention. Nothing is lost, everything is thousands of times safer than its ever been in the past. For the first time in human history we're safe from the danger of the kind of destruction that destroyed the ancient library of Alexandria in 48BC, wiping out perhaps the greatest record of ancient civilisation ever collected under one roof.

OK, so a direct asteroid strike on my village might cause me a few headaches right now – but the ever-increasing speed of online connections means it won't be long before I have another back-up cloned somewhere on another continent. It's already the case for all of Pristine Classical's music files, which exist not only here on various drives and their back-ups, but also have life on storage drives hundreds or thousands of miles away (which is where you're downloading them from), and in the living rooms or offices of those who've purchased our Digital Music Collection drives (another of which headed out of here just yesterday on a mirrored RAID drive – original and back-up in one box – on its trans-Atlantic journey), not to mention the thousands of computers, iPods and shelves of those who've downloaded our FLACs or purchased our CDs, each one a digital clone.

I do still get huge pleasure from records, though I don't hold any great affection for silver discs any more – but then I also have a professional interest here. The reproduction of excellent analogue sound from a piece of black plastic or shellac has always seemed more of a hands-on miracle than the sliding of a CD into a black metal box. But I needed two complete sets of Die Zauberflöte to complete this week's transfer, thanks to the discovery of a handful of shattered discs in my first set, and this was an instant reminder of just how fragile these discs can be. An individual digital clone may be equally fragile – most disc drives don't like deep water, or long falls onto hard surfaces – but in the age of easy cloning this matters less and less every day. I can't clone a 78rpm disc any more than the next man, but we can all make digital clones on our PCs or Macs whenever we like.

Welcome to the Joy of Cloning!

Finally, I promised to pick up on a point I missed last week on the possible decline and demise of the classical CD, and it's a very important one: the death of the classical CD is out of our hands. We could all rush out tomorrow and buy discs galore and it would make no difference whatsoever to the its life expectancy. For as soon as the mass market, the kids buying pop, abandon the CD and the record store, they abandon the vehicle on which the classical market has been hitching a ride these last few years. The shift online by the pop music audience has inevitable economic consequences for the machinery of the music industry as we know it: record shops close, CD distribution ceases, production comes to an end and factories close down. The specialist classical market simply lacks the size to survive on its own under these circumstances. We my only be six years into the era of the legitimate music download, but the transformation of the music business is well underway and happening at lightning pace – it's hard to see what's going to stop it. The only question in my mind is just how long can it hold on as it is?

Andrew Rose

Full list of soloists below 
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra
Favres Solisten Vereinigung
conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham
Studio recording from 1937-8

XR remastering by Andrew Rose at Pristine Audio, April-June 2010
Cover artwork based on 1816 print by Thiele of costume design by Sturmer

Total duration: 2hr 10:01
©2010 Pristine Audio.

For more download and CD options, see our website

The FLAC downloads:

New release today:

SCHUMANN Dichterliebe; Frauenliebe und -leben

Pristine Audio PACO 046

Lotte Lehmann, soprano
Bruno Walter, piano
Recorded in 1941

Transfer from Columbia Masterworks LP ML 4788 in the Pristine Audio collection
XR remastering by Andrew Rose at Pristine Audio, May-June 2010
Cover artwork based on a photograph of Lotte Lehmann

Total duration: 48:03
©2010 Pristine Audio.

For more download and CD options, see our website

The FLAC downloads:

Astounding musicianship and sound quality

Celebrating Schumann's 200th birthday in style

 

• SCHUMANN - Dichterliebe, Op. 48 [notes / score / text]
  Recorded 13th August, 1941, Los Angeles
  
  
• SCHUMANN - Frauenliebe und -leben, Op. 42 [notes / score / text]
  Recorded 24th June, 1941, Los Angeles 
  
  Lotte Lehmann, soprano
  Bruno Walter, piano

SCHUMANN: Dichterliebe; Frauenliebe und -leben

Schumann's 200th birthday was celebrated around the musical world on 8th June, and Pristine's doing its own bit to mark the anniversary with this astonishingly vivid set of lieder.

To bring together soprano Lotte Lehmann with the great conductor Bruno Walter at the keyboard would seem enough in itself, but these 1941 recordings are incredibly good, both in terms of superlative performances, and also in incredibly modern-sounding audio quality.

Pristine's XR remastering has transformed a rather thin and hard tone into something entirely wonderful and alive, apparently knocking decades off the age of the recording. This truly has to be heard...

From Dichterliebe:
11. Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen
12. Am leuchtenden Sommermorgen

Technical notes:

This week (as I write it's 11th June, 2010) marks the 200th birthday of Robert Schumann, and what better way to celebrate the music of this great composer than with a recording of some of his finest work, recorded 101 years after it was written by two of the finest musicians of the twentieth century?

I was rather surprised to find the LP which served as source material for this transfer tucked away in the large collection we recently acquired. Housed in a paper envelope within a protective plastic outer sleeve, it appears from the notes pencilled onto the paper ("Historical value - not hi-fi[!] - heavy rumble[?!]" was one comment [with my punctuation!], "Fully justifies issue" the other) that this was the copy which did the rounds at Philips when they were deciding whether or not to licence the recording for issue in Europe from Columbia. The red tick in the top right hand corner is presumably confirmation that a sufficient number of initials had been accumulated on the sleeve to justify going ahead.

Although dating from the summer of 1941, you'd be hard-pushed to guess the vintage when listening to this remastering. The original, still available in a decent transfer elsewhere, had relatively low background noise, but a musical tone which was strident and rather thin, with a piano that was unrealistic and a voice that was rather too obviously "microphonic" of its era, if you know what I mean.

When I first heard it, this LP sounded an ideal candidate for XR remastering. Carefully-tailored re-equalisation brought from it a truly believable piano and a glorious rendition of Lehmann's voice, the realism of the former being an excellent guide to the accuracy of reproduction of the latter. Careful application of frequency-targeted noise reduction produced an incredibly clean and clear background which is, for the most part, just about inaudible.

It wasn't all plain sailing – there was a tendency to peak distortion in upper frequencies which has been largely tamed though is occasionally still a little evident; there's some pre- and post-echo during sections of the first few tracks still just about audible; I've done a lot of work on areas of swish and the clicks which inevitably arise from any archive disc-based recording, few though these were.

However, I think the end results will surprise many people, just as they've surprised me – once again, it's hard to equate the actual vintage of the recording with the sound one hears when listening to it. A fitting tribute, therefore, both to the composer, Schumann, and to the artists, Lotte Lehmann and Bruno Walter.

Technical notes by Andrew Rose

 

Available as 320kbps Ambient Stereo MP3, 16-bit Ambient Stereo FLAC, 24-bit Ambient Stereo FLAC, Ambient Stereo CD
or listen on demand with Pristine Audio Direct Access (PADA)

---

New MP3 transfers at PADA Exclusives
by Dr. John Duffy
in Ambient Stereo

History of the Cello Vols. 7 & 8:  Spanish - Czech - Italian Scandinavian  Pablo Casals Featuring Cellists: Gaspar Cassado Pablo Casals Ladislov Zalenka Massimo Amfitheatrof Arturo Bonucci Attillo Ranzato Ossian Fohstrom Louis Jordan   Part of a ten-volume series charting the historic recordings of cello music in the 78rpm era, replete with rare and important recordings by the greatest players of the first half of the 20th Century.   This History of the Cello series follows our earlier PADA Exclusives presentation of collections from the Thomas Clear limited edition LP transfer releases, for which we can now also supply scans of Clear-s original typewritten notes: History of Chamber Music:   History of the Violin:   This transfer is presented with Ambient Stereo remastering by Dr. John Duffy. Over 400 PADA Exclusives recordings are available for high-quality streamed listening and free 224kbps MP3 download to all subscribers. Remastered by  Dr John Duffy In Ambient Stereo

Download or stream this recording and many others from only One Euro a week!

Hundreds of historic recordings are available for listening and free MP3 download
  to subscribers to PADA Exclusives, our €1/week streamed audio service.

Other subscription offers give you full access to our entire online catalogue

---

Pick of the reviews

MusicWeb International

Richard WAGNER (1813 - 1883)
Götterdämmerung (1876)
Brünnhilde - Astrid Varnay (soprano)
Siegfried - Wolfgang Windgassen (tenor)
Hagen - Josef Greindl (bass)
Alberich - Gustav Neidlinger (bass-baritone)
Gunther - Hermann Uhde (baritone)
Gutrune - Natalie Hinsch-Gröndahl (soprano)
Waltraute - Ira Malaniuk (contralto)
Woglinde - Erika Zimmermann (soprano)
Wellgunde - Hetty Plümacher (mezzo)
Floßhilde - Gisela Litz (soprano)
1. Norne - Maria von Ilosvay (alto)
2. Norne - Ira Malaniuk (alto)
3. Norne - Regina Resnik (mezzo)
Choir and Orchestra of the Bayreuth Festival/Clemens Krauss
rec. live, in concert, Bayreuth Festival, 12 August 1953
PRISTINE AUDIO PACO042a (2 CDs) PACO042b (2 CDs) [4:19:53] 
Pristine Audio PACO 042


Having just reviewed all three preceding “music-dramas” for MusicWeb International, I was eagerly awaiting the arrival of this final instalment. In many ways it represents a fitting climax to a superb achievement by Andrew Rose, who clearly worked at superhuman pace to remaster the entire “Ring” so quickly and to such a high standard. This set surpasses even his previous achievement: the singing, the orchestral playing and the immediacy and clarity of the sound are all markedly superior, such that I really could forget that it is in mono and temporarily luxuriate in the fantasy that this live “Götterdämmerung” marks the culmination of what really is the best “Ring” on the market.
 
A few things bring me back to earth: a few flubs and imprecisions in orchestral ensemble, the nagging conviction that Windgassen’s rather dry tone and a tendency to bleat and bark is hardly ideal for the barely post-adolescent Siegfried and a tremulous, gusty, hooty Gutrune who is possibly the least satisfactory on record - but so much else is captivating that it is not too difficult to overlook those shortcomings.
 
At least Windgassen seems to have overcome the first night nerves which in “Siegfried” caused him regularly to sing ahead of the beat and make so many errors; here he seems far more confident and secure. Perhaps Varnay’s rock-steady musicality reassured and inspired him, as they make a most impressive team, especially in the ecstatic duet in the Prologue. Varnay, a little trademark scooping and the occasional, forgivable squalliness notwithstanding, is also just terrific in the “Starke Scheite”, whacking out top Bs and B-flats with absolute security and standing comparison with the greatest exponents of Brünnhilde such as Frida Leider and Birgit Nilsson. She is also a thrilling actress whose words are generally pellucid, and she rides the orchestra easily - all the more important now that the remastering has given the latter more prominence.
 
The supporting singers, Hinsch-Gröndahl‘s Gutrune apart, are of the highest calibre, headed by Greindl’s star-turn as Bayreuth’s resident cave-man, his big, black, burly sound perfect for conveying Hagen’s bestial cunning and brutality. As is often the case with this artist, he is not always ideally steady, but he lives the part very convincingly. Equally impressive is Uhde’s incomparable Gunther: nervy, febrile and beautifully vocalised; alongside it, Fischer-Dieskau’s characterisation for Solti seems pale and small-scale. The trio at the end of Act 2 in which Brünnhilde, Gunther and Hagen swear vengeance on Siegfried is always a key point for me and all three singers rise magnificently to its challenges. Nor does Krauss fail here, as he very occasionally does in “Die Walküre”, to generate the requisite tension; indeed I think his pacing of this whole massive work is swift, sweeping and masterly. The Norns are suitably grave and weighty of voice and the other female trio, the Rheinmaidens (“a sort of aquatic Beverley Sisters”, to quote Anna Russell), are a delightful team; sweet and ethereal, maintaining lovely intonation in their tripartite harmonies in thirds. The rich-voiced contralto Ira Malaniuk reminds us what a fine singer she was in her big scene as an alternately grave and frantic Waltraute. Similarly, Neidlinger reasserts his claim in a cameo appearance as the finest Alberich of his generation, in a typically incisive vignette in his nocturnal visit to his son, Hagen.
 
In previous evenings, Krauss was inclined to hurry proceedings along and sometimes ensemble was less than precise, but here there is a gratifyingly large-scale sense of control, vision and pacing; take for example the segue from Waltraute’s departure to the appearance of Siegfried disguised by the Tarnhelm as Gunther. Krauss seems to me to manage the sequence of all Brünnhilde’s emotions, through defiance, determination, exultation, and shocked disbelief; the orchestral coloration is both subtle and skilful, much more like the performance for Karajan the preceding year in “Tristan”.
 
The re-mastering has permitted an astonishing range of frequencies to emerge; orchestral details and a sense of theatrical space are now so much more in evidence. The enhanced aural scope reveals the fact that the audience were mostly remarkably quiet and it would be a churl who complained about the newly audible hiss of the flames engulfing the funeral pyre; the noise of the stage machinery in the Keilberth “Ring” on Testament is by all accounts more distracting.
 
A splendid achievement, then, is this Pristine Audio “Ring”. It makes the prospect of the appearance of further remasterings by Andrew Rose of hitherto muddy-sounding classics, such as Krauss’s “Parsifal”, all the more enticing.
 
Ralph Moore  

---

NOTE: This e-mail is going out to our most recently compiled mailing list of recent customers and existing list members. If you do not wish to receive any further e-mails from Pristine Classical please contact me directly by e-mail at this address and I'll remove your address from our list immediately. Alternatively click here to unsubscribe - please ensure you reply from the same e-mail address that this mailing was sent to.