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The two big Tom Fine remastered Paray/Detroit boxes - update

Posted by Chris from Lafayette (A) on June 28, 2022 at 12:34:08

I posted about these sets a few weeks ago, and the big release date was last Friday. However, just as I feared, the sites I checked (Amazon, Import CD's) evidently had so many preorders that they were immediately sold out! Presto is also supposed to have some copies, but it seems that the availability in the UK won't be until July, so we'll see.

In the meantime, some (but not all) of these remastered recordings have appeared on Qobuz, and I listened to a few tracks last Saturday. (BTW, I'm still disappointed that the resolution is plain old CD 16/44 - I was hoping that there would be higher rez downloads available, maybe 24/96, but I haven't seen any yet.) The tracks I heard were the Debussy Nocturnes for Orchestra, the Schumann Manfred Overture, and the Ravel Mother Goose Suite.

In many cases, these Paray/Detroit recordings were my imprint versions of the various works in the repertoire, and they've been my faithful companions over the decades. As I mentioned in my previous posts, Paray could really gather up a head of steam with his tempos, and, listening to the Debussy Nocturnes, I once again felt how apt Paray's fast tempos could be. In Nuages, Paray's tempo is almost exactly TWICE AS FAST as Celibidache's is on his DG recording! Often, Paray's performances are of the type to make other performances seem sluggish and self-indulgent - at least for awhile until you recover! I eventually got used to the slower performances too, but the Paray recordings always seemed to have a special electricity. In Sirenes, Odysseus seems to speed past their island in a motorboat - no chance of getting ensnared and dashed here! Paray is going so fast that it's hard to tell if the tricky duplet/triplet differentiation (which so many recorded performances get wrong - I'll never know why!) is correct or not. Ms. CfL thought that Paray had the same problem here as other conductors: the triplets were too late and consequently too fast to be triplets! She's right of course, but Paray's tempo makes it more difficult to tell - LOL! As for the remastering, the sound of the cymbals in Fetes seems old fashioned and less realistic than on many more modern recordings, and I don't know if this is because of the original recording, the 16/44 limitation, or just the sound of the instruments themselves.


(original LP cover)

Overall, the sound on all the tracks I listened to was exceptionally smooth - almost like that on a DSD recording than on a 16/44 PCM recording. The rap on some of these recordings is that there can be a certain thinness to the sound, a quality which these new remasterings have not completely overcome. BTW, I have not yet listened to any of these Tom Fine remasterings in direct comparison to the original CD issues of these recordings produced by his mother, Wilma Cozart Fine. In addition, there have been some remasterings derived from the original commercial reel-to-reel tapes done by HDTT, which are also worthy of consideration. Maybe I can post a follow-up.

One last warning: you have to be careful if you're listening on Qobuz to check just what it is you're listening to. The new Tom Fine remasterings will have a somewhat confusing reference to their Australian Eloquence origins, per the partial screen grab below:

(as the Qobuz track listing looks on Audirvana)

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