advertisement


Astonishingly holographic recordings

5cb9a17acf686.jpeg


Very clear and firm sound image here, an impressive new release in every way.
 
This is certainly one of the best piano recordings I’ve heard, maybe the best, I mean from the sound point of view, and the interpretation’s pretty good too! All the Mindru Katz solo recordings that I’ve heard have exceptional sound and are interpretatively interesting

500x500.jpg


Not a household name, he was a star soloist with the Israel Philharmonic who died in his 50s. There are loads of concerto recordings which I haven’t heard, I bet they’re good. He was famous for his Emperor Concerto apparently.
 
4010072774385.jpg


This CD has an excellent image, holographic, on my ESLs. But it is flat and boomy on my JR149s played at a normal volume. However, played quietly on the 149s it's very good.

I really think that anyone who reviews music needs to have multiple systems, and all good quality.
 
51QlODv0rGL._SY355_.jpg


The sound on this one is so perfect, so polished, so well balanced and voiced, so even, radiant and beautiful, that it has stopped sounding like the experience of live music. The consequences of that are really hard to explain. It’s as if somehow the recording has lost the sense of sounds resulting from real people who breathe, people with viscera, making real strings vibrate, in a real room. Your perspective is unfeasibly perfect - you can hear the asperities of all the instruments as if you’re close to all of them, but you hear all the voices equally as if your not close to any one of them. In my opinion there’s a a really high price to pay for this level of beauty, because the thing which makes listening music interesting for me isn’t the sound, it’s getting a glimpse of the engagement of a human being with a score and an instrument. So there’s a sense which this sound engineering as killed something essential, crucial.
 
MI0001170723.jpg
91a1bog4lDL._SS500_.jpg



Franz Raml is a musician who I admire very much, creative interpretations with a sense of both seriousness and élan, in Scheidt and in Hassler and in Pachelbel. At least on organ for these composers, I don’t think that there’s better. But what I want to mention here, at least in the two above, is the extraordinary recording quality, which make me very aware of what so many other recordings lack - that’s a sense of space.

When you hear a big church organ live it’s the feeling of music resounding over a vast space which gives the experience its impact. The little resonances caused by the vast walls and pillars. Many recordings seem to me to polish that out in the studio, and the result while being transparent, can be dead. But thankfully Dabringhaus and Grimm are committed to a more truthful engineering policy, and in the two recordings above I am sure they’ve implemented it brilliantly.

Listening with ESL63 + Gradient + Townsend supertweeters and Electrocompaniet EC1-2for the main speakers. This setup is outstanding for organ music.
 
ODRCD357-Fred-Thomas-Bach-solo-Cover.jpg



https://fred-thomas.co.uk/solo-piano-bach/


"Creative recording techniques also played an aesthetic role. Using many microphones and basing their blended combinations on inherent musical character enables each movement to inhabit a unique soundworld. This process became genuinely interpretative, post-production. Although relatively under-explored in classical music recording (where the goal is often to reproduce the ‘natural’ sound of a live concert), my aim is to treat recording technique as an independent, exploratory art form."

The label, Odradek, looks like it's worth exploring.

How do you make the image smaller?
 
I just cannot believe how good the l’homme armé mass sounds here. The music’s mystical and powerful, the OVPP performance is intense, the composer is obscure but there’s no good reason for that.

But that’s not what I’m meaning, that’s not why I’m creating the thread. It sounds like they are there in the room, or rather my room has become the venue - a church hall maybe. You can still buy it from Orf’s website.

https://shop.orf.at/rso/en/search?sSearch=Faugues

5744723

I believe that the word you are looking is not so much "holographic" but an "immersive" or "involving" sound.
This is quite typical of music recorded in churches and other large stone venues which are echoey, highly reverberant spaces.

This binaural recording made using a 2-mic dummy-head sounds very real with headphones:

https://harmonicclassics.com/album/H_CD_9140/

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B000050KJS/?tag=pinkfishmedia-21
 
This site contains affiliate links for which pink fish media may be compensated.


advertisement


Back
Top