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Gould/Ancerl/beethoven/Toronto

173.179.70.68
Posted on May 21, 2017 at 12:11:37
Diogenes
Audiophile

Posts: 315
Joined: February 17, 2014
 Watching (!) Glen Gould playing Beethoven 5 on 100 inch projector screen on Youtube. Ithink Beethoven won. Altho nonHD, sound is decent (Yammie Receiver, 7.1 Klipsch).
Orchestra surprisingly tight. Is that Steven Staryk as concermaster? (one of the greatest little-known violinists)? Good photography, probsbly CBC, altho this appears to be a crylic TV programme.
Ancerl is one of my fave conductors. He fled Czechoslovakia when the Russians came in, conducted in Toronto only to die of cancer. I was there in high school, went spordically, and I knew nothing.

 

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That's a much more "straight" performance. . . , posted on May 21, 2017 at 17:47:17
Chris from Lafayette
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Location: SF Bay Area
Joined: February 17, 2004
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  Since: February 6, 2012
 . . . than Gould's performance on his commercial recording with Stokowski. My piano teacher told me that Ancerl wouldn't let Gould get away with his usual shenanigans. (Don't know how he knew about this however - but he DID have connections, and maybe he knew Ancerl.)

Regarding the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops, when Ancerl left, Vaclav Neumann left the LGO (it's not clear whether this resignation was in protest or not) to replace him at the helm of the CzPO. I think inside the country, Neumann was pretty popular, but here in the west, Ancerl was always considered superior (a view I don't share BTW, although I also think very highly of Ancerl's conducting too). Some idiot critics here in the US even considered Neumann a stooge - a view which is far from the truth IMO.

When I asked Ivan Moravec how he got out of the country at that time, he told me that the bureaucracy in Czechoslovakia then was so confused and disorganized after the invasion, that they were letting anybody who wanted to leave the country freely for a period of time. They didn't clamp back down on foreign travel until later on when things had settled back to "normal". As you may remember, Moravec decided to return to communist Czechoslovakia after a few years of "freedom" in the west. The Czech government still let him travel to the west on concert tours even after he returned to the country.

 

RE: That's a much more "straight" performance. . . , posted on May 21, 2017 at 20:11:51
Analog Scott
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Posts: 9933
Joined: January 8, 2002
 I am still in awe of the fact that you knew Ivan Moravec

 

It really wasn't that extensive - 4 days total, posted on May 22, 2017 at 00:47:33
Chris from Lafayette
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Posts: 26428
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 I was in one of his master classes.
I helped him set up for a public lecture he gave at Stanford.
I was seated next to him and his wife, at his request, for dinner on two separate occasions (both at Scott's Seafood in San Jose) - that's it!
EDIT: Strangely, these events occurred over a six-year period.

 

RE: It really wasn't that extensive - 4 days total, posted on May 22, 2017 at 12:36:01
Analog Scott
Audiophile

Posts: 9933
Joined: January 8, 2002
 I'm still in awe. Moravec is da man!!!

 

Yeah, I like Neumann too -- still underappreciated IMO [nt], posted on May 23, 2017 at 18:31:01
Amphissa
Audiophile

Posts: 2717
Location: Zardoz
Joined: March 9, 2004
 .

"Life without music is a mistake" (Nietzsche)

 

RE: Vaclav Neumann, posted on May 24, 2017 at 16:40:08
Ivan303
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Posts: 48887
Location: Cadiere d'azur FRANCE - Santa Fe, NM
Joined: February 26, 2001

If you like Martinu.

If not, there is little hope for you. :-(




First they came for the dumb-asses
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a dumb-ass

 

I wonder if that's a remaster of the originals, posted on May 24, 2017 at 23:35:51
Chris from Lafayette
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Posts: 26428
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 I used to own that whole set (as individual CD's), but I never was happy with the amorphous SQ which Supraphon provided. If it's a re-master, maybe the SQ is improved. When Neumann re-recorded the 3rd and 6th symphonies in conjunction with Denon (part of those early digital Denon/Supraphon efforts), the engineering gave the re-recordings a much sharper profile, even though in the Sixth Symphony, Neumann's tempos had slowed down. I still think that that Munch/BSO recording of the Sixth was pretty ideal as a combination of performance and engineering. (And this is not to say that there aren't other excellent recordings of the Martinu symphonies too.)

 

RE: "amorphous SQ which Supraphon provided"..., posted on May 25, 2017 at 07:05:43
Ivan303
Audiophile

Posts: 48887
Location: Cadiere d'azur FRANCE - Santa Fe, NM
Joined: February 26, 2001

You need to do a few 'downgrades' to your system. ;-)

Would that it were a remastering of his work, but perhaps the master tapes are long gone.

I don't think it is, but it's a Columbia Japan re-issue of about 2005 so it might be.

The only thing I can stream on TIDAL or QOBUZ are the 1989 re-issue on CD as above.




First they came for the dumb-asses
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a dumb-ass

 

I always assumed that that one was just a re-packaging. . . , posted on May 25, 2017 at 10:18:09
Chris from Lafayette
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Posts: 26428
Location: SF Bay Area
Joined: February 17, 2004
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  Since: February 6, 2012
 . . . of the original individual issues, not a re-mastering - especially since it came out not long after the original series was completed.



I think part of the problem was that this album was from Supraphon's series of Quad recordings (you can see the "stereo/quad" indication in the upper right-hand corner), which didn't impress anyone on 2-channel. OTOH, there have been Japanese re-masters of these older Supraphon quad recordings in discrete quad on SACD. I got one of them a few years ago (Mahler's Fifth with Neumann) and didn't find it to be much of an improvement.



Looks like I should sell it (i.e., the Japanese quad SACD) - it's going for $499.84 on Amazon right now! ;-)

 

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