After a successful musical career in Hollywood, pianist,
composer, and conductor Andre Previn became the Music Director of the Houston Symphony
Orchestra in 1967 and then the Principal Conductor of the London Symphony
Orchestra in 1968, serving in the latter post until 1979. Although he has gone
on to do more good work with various orchestras, it was during his tenure with
the LSO that he made some of his finest recordings, at first with RCA but
mostly with EMI. Indeed, it is with the LSO during the Seventies that Previn
made some now legendary EMI recordings, which are only just now seeing the
audiophile remasterings they deserve.
In 2002 JVC remastered Previn’s EMI recording of
Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream
on an XRCD, but that seemed to be the end of it. Until recently, as Hi-Q
Records have taken up the slack, using JVC’s XRCD24 K2 processing to do a
series of remasterings of material by Previn and others. It’s about time, I
say. Up until these releases, the best we could get from the EMI material were
the regular reissues from EMI Japan, with their very slightly better dynamics
and bass than the regular British product. Now, it’s Hi-Q and JVC to the rescue
again.
Anyway, Previn always seemed to me to have a somewhat
limited repertoire, yet what he did perform and record (mostly English,
American, and Russian material, with the aforementioned Mendelssohn thrown in)
was always among the best available. Certainly, that applies to the disc under
discussion, Tchaikovsky’s popular 1812
Overture.
Peter Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) wrote the 1812 Overture in 1880 to celebrate
Russia's defense of Moscow against Napoleon's advancing army at the Battle of
Borodino in 1812. As usual with the composer, he didn’t like the work very
much. He complained that he was "not a conductor of festival pieces"
and that the Overture would be
"very loud and noisy, but without artistic merit because I wrote it without
warmth and without love.” Whatever, along with a couple of his ballets and
symphonies, it has become his most-famous and most often performed work.
Of the multitudinous recordings of the 1812, only a few truly stand out: Antal
Dorati’s old Mercury Living Presence version for its sheer excitement, Erich
Kunzel’s Telarc disc with its thrilling cannon fire, and Sian Edwards’s and
Fritz Reiner’s sane and sensible accounts for EMI and RCA respectively would be
on my own short list. But Previn’s EMI performance still tops the field, for me
the most imaginative and atmospheric interpretation of the bunch, the one that
holds my attention from beginning to end no matter how many times I listen to
it. And that’s no mean feat, given how hackneyed much of the 1812 has become through sheer
repetition. Apparently, I’m not the only one who likes what Previn did with the
work, either, considering that his recording has been continuously in the EMI
catalogue on LP and CD for over forty years.
In the 1812
Previn starts very slowly, building up the momentum incrementally rather than
going for broke in the first half. Then, when he does heighten the music’s
power, the piece really gets rolling. By the time Previn reaches the big
climactic moments toward the end, he has created a genuinely exciting
experience for the listener. The final five minutes are thrilling, indeed!
Previn goes on to handle the two couplings equally well.
The Marche Slave, which I have
usually thought of as Tchaikovsky’s 1812
without the cannons, has presence and bite. What’s more, the Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture is
supremely romantic: lush, lyrical, and
rhapsodic. Previn has the measure of all these works and isn’t afraid to let
his emotions show. Maybe that comes from his Hollywood days.
EMI recorded the music in 1972 at Kingsway Hall, London,
and obviously did a good job. However, I always felt the LP sounded better on
the whole than the compact disc, the CD transfer seeming a little softer and
woolier to me. So how would this newly remastered audiophile edition sound?
After all, Hi-Q Records took the recording directly from the original master
tape and engineered it employing JVC’s XRCD K2 processing, a meticulous
technique that begins with the analogue signal digitized directly into K2 24-bit,
sent to JVC for playback via Digital K2 to eliminate jitter and distortion,
converted using K2 Super Coding to 16 bit, and encoded using a DVD K2 laser
with JVC’s Extended Pit Cutting Technology, the operation controlled by a K2
Rubidium Clock they claim is over 10,000 times more accurate than a
conventional crystal clock. I think what all this means is that the process
Hi-Q uses, much as companies like FIM/LIM and JVC themselves use, is about as
precise and accurate as one can get in transferring an analogue tape signal to
compact disc.
I put the Hi-Q disc in one player and the regular EMI
version in another and prepared to listen and compare, switching them out from
time to time ensure I was actually comparing discs and not CD players. The
first thing I noticed about the EMI disc, which I hadn’t listened to in a few
years, was that it was a tad fat and clouded. The Hi-Q was tauter, more
transparent, with a bit less upper and mid-bass overhang. In other words, there
was less veiling involved. Next, on the Hi-Q I heard more bite on the snare
drums, the overall transient quickness and dynamic impact better. High notes
were more open on the Hi-Q as well, better clarified.
Each time I went back to the EMI issue, I heard a distinct
muffling of the sound. Now, I know what you are really wondering: How do those
cannons come off in the Hi-Q 1812?
Just fine is the answer, tighter and better defined than on the EMI disc. Just
don’t expect Telarc cannon fire; they aren’t quite in that league. I’ve long
thought it odd, too, that the second bank of cannons on the EMI LP and CD never
sounded as deep as the first round; I don’t know why this is, but it’s the same
on the Hi-Q mastering.
Meanwhile, it is actually on the accompanying pieces that
the Hi-Q sounds best. For whatever reason, the Marche Slave and Romeo and
Juliet pieces seem even more transparent on the XRCD24 remastering. Again,
I don’t know why. Maybe I was just becoming more used to the sound of both
discs and better able to discern differences. In any event, I think the nature
of the source material is such that while neither disc displays quite as much
clarity, depth, impact, or air as it might, there is no doubt the Hi-Q
remastering is the superior of the two. Even if it’s not a day-and-night
difference, it’s plainly audible.
In addition to the precision processing, Hi-Q Records
package the disc in a very substantial, beautifully illustrated Digipak, with
note pages fastened book-like inside. It is a high-class product, although it
doesn’t come cheap. Unless you have very deep pockets, it’s the sort of product
you buy to replace a favored recording that you want to own and listen to in
the very best possible sound. Even if it’s only marginally better, it should be
worthwhile to dedicated audiophiles looking to obtain the last ounce of great
sound from their multi-buck playback systems.
JJP
