Home Music Lane

It's all about the music, dude! Sit down, relax and listen to some tunes.

Now for some REAL music: a new recording of Respighi's Roman Trilogy

Of course, I'm not giving up my Reiner and Gatti recordings, but a new recording by a Texas youth orchestra (the Texas Music Festival Orchestra) has just been released over at the HDTT (High-Definition Tape Transfers) site. HDTT seems to be striking more and more towards a mode of issuing new recordings of their own in recent years, in addition to their well known reissue operations.

This new album has a number of unique attractions which I find interesting and even compelling, despite a couple of blemishes too. The orchestra is associated with the University of Houston and consists of players aged 18-30, perhaps similar to MTT's New World Symphony Orchestra in Florida. Youth orchestras have gotten so good that more and more recordings these days employ them, often with major name conductors at the helm. These performances were recorded in concert, so, although there are some infelicities of playing or ensemble every now and then, these mishaps are not that much more numerous than what one might hear with a professional orchestra in a once-through shot at this repertoire in a concert situation. (And the reason I say "once-through" is because many "live" radio broadcasts of symphony orchestras these days are stitched together from a series of performances - maybe three or four. That's not the case in this recording, which derives from a single concert, June 11th of this year.)

The production and engineering for this recording were done by John Proffitt, who did such great work in Remy Ballot's performance of the Bruckner Eighth with another youth orchestra (the Oberosterreichisches Jugendsinfonieorchester - sorry for the missing umlaut!) on a Gramola SACD.



I thought John's recording was VERY impressive! In a way, this is really what I've been wanting in a modern recording of these works: the thud in the bass is particularly impressive, and it's something I've been missing on a number of recent commercial recordings. At the same time, the hall acoustic (the Moores Opera House, University of Houston) seems unpleasantly dry - it would be nice if they had a recording location in Houston with a bit more reverberation (IMHO). And while the bass strength throughout is wonderful, I thought that the organ part at the end of the first section of Feste Romane was kind of weak. (I wonder if some kind of portable organ was used?) If you listen to this recording in multi-channel, I think you'll be astonished by how the trumpets in Feste Romane virtually crawl up your back with their opening fanfares - they're placed in the rear channels in this section, and hearing them like this is really a staggering, hair-raising experience! In addition, I really like the balance among the different sections of the orchestra, and I especially appreciate the fact that the strings do not get swamped by the brass and percussion as they do on some recordings of this work. Bravo!

Getting back to the performances: although the fact that this performance is by a youth orchestra is nothing short of amazing, the interpretation of Feste Romane does seem to be a bit more straight-laced (i.e., with less flexibility in the rhythm than one might usually hear - especially in the wind solos) than most of the performances by professional orchestras on other recordings. The Pines and Fountains are better in this respect. The thing I like most of all is that, despite the incidental lapses of ensemble, there's a real eagerness, enthusiasm and sense of occasion to the performance. It's palpable, and it's a real attraction of this recording. I had no familiarity with the conductor (Franz Anton Krager) before, but he certainly seems to know his stuff - at least with this repertoire!

I got the 24/192 surround file, which, as usual with HDTT, arrives as a ZIP file and needs to be expanded to its FLAC format. I usually convert the resulting FLAC file to the AIFF format (so that my processor doesn't have to work so hard during playback - LOL!), but in the case of the Feste Romane track, I had problems. I usually use a program call "Max" to do this, but it choked during the conversion and would not produce anything at all. I then tried DBPowerAmp, which seemed to work, but when I played back the resulting AIFF file, it contained only the first two minutes. I finally ended up using VLC media player to playback the FLAC file directly - that worked. The Pines and Fountains tracks converted fine to AIFF. Just a bit of an oddity with the Feste Romane track - I've never had problems in converting any other track I've downloaded from HDTT.

I also ran spectrograph software on the Feste Romane track (BTW, one track for each piece - no subdivision into sections on this album), and the high frequencies seem to peak at just below 30kHz. The master seems to be PCM, since I didn't see any tell-tale ultra high frequency noise-dusting typical of a DSD file. One more thing: the dynamic range of this recording is WIDE (per our recent discussion of the last volume of Vanska/Minnesota Sibelius symphones on BIS), and I also think that the average dynamic level is a bit lower on this recording than on most other recordings, so be forewarned! When those Roman legions arrive at the end of Pines, you may find yourself jumping out of your seat to avoid getting crushed by their inexorable progress!

If you're interested in this repertoire (i.e., of the "orchestral spectacular" persuasion), I'm thinking you might find this album (which, BTW, is available in a variety of formats: DSD64, various flavors of PCM - both multi-channel and two-channel, and actual burned discs) very much worth your while as a listening experience, just as I did.


This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:
  Amplified Parts  


Topic - Now for some REAL music: a new recording of Respighi's Roman Trilogy - Chris from Lafayette 13:00:26 08/21/16 (17)

FAQ

Post a Message!

Forgot Password?
Moniker (Username):
Password (Optional):
  Remember my Moniker & Password  (What's this?)    Eat Me
E-Mail (Optional):
Subject:
Message:   (Posts are subject to Content Rules)
Optional Link URL:
Optional Link Title:
Optional Image URL:
Upload Image:
E-mail Replies:  Automagically notify you when someone responds.