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"What are good sources of hi-rez files (legitimate)?"

Posted by Chris from Lafayette (A) on July 4, 2016 at 15:29:07

In Reply to: Basic Education Needed... posted by Lee of Omaha on June 22, 2016 at 10:39:02:

I'm also going from your private correspondence, wherein you indicated that you're interested in SACD's, rather than downloads or blu-ray audios, etc. Even so, I have to put this preamble in here now, because not all listeners are listening for the same things (either in a performance or a recording), so, although I like to think I have a fair amount of experience listening to the Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Gershwin, Stravinsky, Bizet, etc. repertoire, I certainly haven't listened to everything - not even with the Mahler Fifth, where I managed to acquire (and listen to) over 80 recordings of that work in the past 12 or so years. So as long as we agree that this whole "recommendation" business is subjective, I'll take a shot.

Some listeners feel that the great recordings of yesteryear have never been surpassed, even with respect to engineering. And I do agree that, in certain ways, such as the holistic quality of the sound (resulting from the generally minimalist approach to microphoning), the recordings from the "golden age of stereo" do hold their own even against the best of what came along subsequently. So, limiting myself to SACD's, I'll start with the Mercury reissues:

(The SACD)
(The original LP issue - for some crazy reason, the SACD took its cover from Dorati's mono Minneapolis SO recording)

This is IMHO the most exciting Nutcracker ever committed to disc, both in terms of performance and engineering - Dorati himself did not replicate it when he re-recorded it years later with the Concertgebouw Orchestra. The 35mm source defines what "crisp and clear" mean as these words relate to audio engineering, and yet, as with all Mercury recordings, one has a sense of the hall too. Some listeners feel that the softer, romantic side of the score loses out in this recording, but no single performance can encompass everything, and if I want to listen to a softer, more yielding approach to the score, I will indeed listen to another recording. Another criticism you'll sometimes hear about this recording is that Dorati pushes the tempos too hard - but what's really happened is that most conductors have simply slowed down in the meantime, compared to the days of Reiner, Markevitch (AND, yes, Dorati!). No doubt about it, this Dorati/LSO recording is always the first one I think of when I want to listen to this music.

I'm tempted to put Dorati's LSO recording of Stravinsky's "The Firebird" (also reissued on SACD) on this list too, but I think I'll limit myself to the Mercuries which were originally recorded on 35mm film. In a way, this is a shame, because some of the 35mm masters had been lost by the time the CD's and SACD's were reissued - such as the magnificent Janis/Kondrashin/Moscow PO collaboration in the Rachmaninoff 1 and the Prokofiev 3. Cellist Janos Starker wasn't so unlucky, and I recommend three of his Mercury SACD's:



I particularly recommend the Bach Cello Suites, which were recorded in the blessed time before the HIP movement (with its sackcloth-and-ashes approach to string vibrato) made such devastating inroads into the public thinking about eighteenth-century music! In the Bach Suites, there is Starker, and then there are the also rans! ;-)

Actually, I'm going to break my own rule and include one non-35mm Mercury recording, just because because I'm so in love with the performance. That would be the Paray/Detroit SO Berlioz album, which includes a performance of the Symphonie fantastique that's right on the knife's edge of Paray's thrill-ride tempos (after all, Berlioz was depicting a pretty deranged state in this work) and the orchestra's ability to articulate the expression at those same tempos - something I don't feel that Munch, who took a similar approach, managed as well.



Unfortunately, as I've been checking at Amazon to get the links to the album covers for the SACD's shown above, I've noticed that some of these recordings have appreciated in asking price by quite a bit - over a hundred dollars in a couple of cases, which may discourage their purchase. There have been a couple of recent Mercury reissues (the hi-rez incarnations of which are available only as 24/96 downloads) which are even better (IMHO) than these SACD's. These recent issues have used the Plangent Process and other technological developments to obtain even greater fidelity to the original recordings. The chief title here is Dorati's New Philharmonia recording of the Tchaikovsky Orchestral Suites - it's so good (again, IMHO) that I wish the powers that be would re-do the whole Mercury catalog again to take advantage of these technological breakthroughs (which Wilma did not have at the time she did her original CD reissues). In many ways, these Tchaikovsky Suites are the best realization of a Mercury recording I've ever heard (LP. tape, CD, SACD, or, in this case, download)!



If I were going further with this post right now, I would next cover the RCA Living Stereo SACD reissues, but perhaps I should take a breather and ask you whether you're more interested in these kinds of reissues (i.e., older, "geezer nostalgia" recordings!), or in newer recordings, where the dynamic and frequency extremes are less inhibited by the available technology, and where the potential for realism is enhanced even further by the multi-channel capability. I also have the feeling that I'm covering this subject in too much detail. Perhaps all you wanted was a list?

• Link to my original post about Dorati's Tchaikovsky Suites   (Open in New Window)

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