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Tchaikovsky: Swan Lake (Järvi/Bergen Philharmonic) - 24/96 5.1 Download

Posted by Chris from Lafayette (A) on November 27, 2013 at 13:07:10

I think this recording became available about a month and a half ago. I was excited about it, based on the same team's "Sleeping Beauty" from last year, but I had to replace my RAID drive before I could resume my downloading activities. What made the Järvi/Bergen "Sleeping Beauty" such an attraction was the extraordinary recorded sound allied to Järvi's brisk take on the music (i.e., concert tempos, rather than dancers' tempos). And I must say that for the last year or two, I've felt a real synergy between the Chandos hi-rez recordings and my system: they just sound great (and I mean audiophile quality), which is most unusual for a mainstream (or semi-mainstream) label with as heavy a release schedule as Chandos maintains.



One commonality between last year's "Sleeping Beauty" and the new "Swan Lake" recordings is the use of the Thuresson CM402 microphones as the principal pick-ups for both recordings. This model, which I think has been available for about 6-7 years is a hand-built design constructed/assembled by Thuresson in Sweden. (I understand that at one time, he was building these microphones out of his kitchen!) It has dual diaphragms, and supports nine pickup patterns. The "recording hacks" site also has this to say:

"The most remarkable aspect of the mic is its physical design, in which the capsule and amplifier electronics together float within a metal-mesh cylinder that is surrounded by an exoskeletal cage. This approach minimizes the number of reflective surfaces near the capsule, thereby reducing sonic coloration. Users confirm that the mic’s response is “accurate” rather than “colored.”"

The picture of the microphone below is also taken from the "recording hacks" site:



Anyway, whatever Thuresson is doing, the results on these Chandos Järvi/Bergen releases sound fantastic on my system, with a beautiful, natural balance between quickness and depth.

As for the performance, the same general "whip up the excitement" approach is taken, but, in places, it doesn't always work out quite so well is it did in Sleeping Beauty: sometimes, the tempos are going so fast that the accentuation and placing of the notes gets compromised. I grew up on the Dorati/Minneapolis recordings of the Tchaikovsky ballets (or, in the case of The Nutcracker, Dorati/LSO), so I generally welcome performances that move along, but Järvi occasionally neglects other aspects of the music when he's pushing the tempos. (Kind of a paradox about Dorati BTW: although he conducted the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo for years, he favored concert tempos when he made his recordings of these ballets.)

When I first read the MusicWeb International review of this new "Swan Lake" by Dan Morgan, I hadn't heard the recording yet. I was impressed by Dan's knowledge of other Swan Lake recordings, but he and I seemed to have different expectations of the music, and, frankly, I found some of his remarks a bit suspect. Now, having heard the recording, I do think he makes some vaild points, but the general negative tone of his review is unshared by me. For instance, what for Dan is "rhythmic inflexibility" in parts of the performance is for me often just a disciplined approach (and a welcome one at that!). At another point, Dan asserts that "all those delectable tunes pass as if on a featureless assembly line to nowhere". I sure don't hear it that way, even if I'm not entirely happy with all of the details of the performance. As with Jarvi's "Sleeping Beauty", one big plus for this new "Swan Lake" is the solo violin sections as played by James Ehnes - although not overmiked at all, he manages to outclass the vast majority of soloists (mostly the orchestra concert masters, or as the Brits say, "leaders") in the purity and accuracy of his playing - this is a truly deluxe feature in this recording.

The spectrographs of the selected tracks I opened looked beautiful (clean response to about 40 kHz - no ultrasonic noise up there either - remember I got the 24/96 download, not the SACD), and, as I mentioned before, the recording sounds wonderful to me. The only problem was the duration of the download: I used the Classical Shop Download Manager so that I wouldn't have to babysit each of the 55 tracks, but the Download Manager takes way longer on my system - in this case 20 hours and 45 minutes! (That's still better than the three days (!) it took me to download "Sleeping Beauty" last year - but I was having error problems on some tracks at that time.) We've had this issue come up before, and I know that other listeners get much speedier results with their downloads from The Classical Shop than I often do. The downloaded FLAC files totaled 6.25 GB - which I then converted to AIFF prior to listening. Despite my qualms about details in the performance I do recommend this new "Swan Lake".

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