Nov 29, 2015

Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 1 (HQCD review)

Also, Piano Sonata No. 22. Sviatoslav Richter, piano; Charles Munch, Boston Symphony Orchestra. HDTT HQCD278.

It was several years ago that I reviewed a remastering of this recording from JVC in their XRCD series of audiophile discs. There, I found the sound, recorded more than half a century ago, rock solid. Not like most of today's classical recordings that to me can appear misty, cloudy, fuzzy, excessively soft, or, even more likely, overly hard. With the exception of a touch of background noise, this older recording from JVC sounded just right, especially the piano, which was strong and steady in an unexaggerated way. The JVC XRCD issues, however, are expensive, no matter how much pleasure they provide. Which is where this HDTT (High Definition Tape Transfers) release comes in. It's almost identical in sound quality with the JVC product but at a much lower cost.

Anyway, Sviatoslav Richter was a legend in Communist Russia before the Soviet government allowed him to record in the West. When he did begin recording in America, among the companies he worked for was RCA in their "Living Stereo" series, one of the best places for any artist to record at the time. In the present recording, backed by Charles Munch and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Richter brings a robust vitality to this first of Beethoven's five piano concertos. The fact is, I hadn't really thought about Richter's recording much in quite a while until hearing it on the JVC release. It had been many, many years since I had last listened to it, and I hadn't remembered it being so thoroughly Romantic or so thoroughly powerful as it is, nor had I remembered how lovely and embracing the slow movement could be under Richter. He produces a vivacious opening movement, a meltingly beautiful slow movement, and a sparkling conclusion.

Perhaps it's just that Richter brings out the best in the music, I don't know. Going back and listening to relatively newer recordings by pianists Stephen Kovacevich with conductor Colin Davis on Philips and Murray Perahia with Bernard Haitink on Sony, also favorites, I found them good but not so dynamic or persuasive as Richter.

The companion piece on the disc, Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 22, also comes off in a most vigorous and dramatic fashion. Richter's way with the keyboard is both precise and incisive, making each note sound out loudly, clearly, purposefully. As with the Concerto, the Sonata offers a most impressive performance and makes a worthy coupling.

Sviatoslav Richter
Producers Max Wilcox and Peter Dellheim and engineers John Crawford and Lewis Layton recorded the music at Boston Symphony Hall (Concerto) and Webster Hall, NY (Sonata) in November 1960. HDTT transferred the recording to CD from an RCA 4-track tape.

I have sometimes found Munch and the Boston Symphony sounding thin, steely, and hard in their early RCA releases, but not really here. There may be a touch of hardness to the sound but nothing thin or bright about this recording. It is, if anything, darkly aggressive and absolutely stable, well complementing Richter's sturdy, energetic, and wholly realistic piano.

As I mentioned above, I had reviewed this recording several years before, remastered by JVC in their XRCD audiophile line and found the sound excellent in almost every way except for a bit of bass noise and a small degree of hardness. With this HDTT remastering (on an HQCD), there is no bass noise and more warmth than hardness. For comparison purposes, I put both discs into separate players and switched back and forth; to double check, I swapped out the discs and played them in the opposite machines. The bass noise was definitely on the JVC disc, not the HDTT. Of course, it's not possible for me to tell if the noise was in the original master tape and JVC transferred it directly to disc that way; or whether JVC's usually immaculate XRCD mastering introduced the noise; or whether RCA eliminated the noise from the four-track tape HDTT used; or whether HDTT eliminated the noise themselves from this disc transfer. What I do know is that the HDTT is quiet, with no apparent side effects.

In practically every other way, it's difficult to differentiate between the HDTT and JVC products. Maybe the JVC is a touch clearer (the HDTT having a very slight, almost unnoticeable degree of fuzz around the notes), and maybe the HDTT is a tad more dynamic (the impact is certainly strong). The main thing to know is that the HDTT disc costs about half or less (depending on the format you choose) the price of the rather expensive JVC product, making the HDTT clearly the superior bargain.

Anyway, the HDTT sonics are big and full, with plenty of zip and zoom (old audiophile talk), and lots of depth, dimensionality, and natural hall ambience. It's one of HDTT's best-sounding discs, and that's saying quite a lot, given that HDTT has successfully remastered any number of very fine recordings.

For further information on HDTT products, prices, discs, and downloads in a variety of formats, you can visit their Web site at http://www.highdeftapetransfers.com/.

JJP

To listen to a brief excerpt from this album, click here:
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Meet the Staff

Meet the Staff
John J. Puccio, Founder and Contributor

Understand, I'm just an everyday guy reacting to something I love. And I've been doing it for a very long time, my appreciation for classical music starting with the musical excerpts on the Big Jon and Sparkie radio show in the early Fifties and the purchase of my first recording, The 101 Strings Play the Classics, around 1956. In the late Sixties I began teaching high school English and Film Studies as well as becoming interested in hi-fi, my audio ambitions graduating me from a pair of AR-3 speakers to the Fulton J's recommended by The Stereophile's J. Gordon Holt. In the early Seventies, I began writing for a number of audio magazines, including Audio Excellence, Audio Forum, The Boston Audio Society Speaker, The American Record Guide, and from 1976 until 2008, The $ensible Sound, for which I served as Classical Music Editor.

Today, I'm retired from teaching and use a pair of bi-amped VMPS RM40s loudspeakers for my listening. In addition to writing for the Classical Candor blog, I served as the Movie Review Editor for the Web site Movie Metropolis (formerly DVDTown) from 1997-2013. Music and movies. Life couldn't be better.

Karl Nehring, Editor and Contributor

For nearly 30 years I was the editor of The $ensible Sound magazine and a regular contributor to both its equipment and recordings review pages. I would not presume to present myself as some sort of expert on music, but I have a deep love for and appreciation of many types of music, "classical" especially, and have listened to thousands of recordings over the years, many of which still line the walls of my listening room (and occasionally spill onto the furniture and floor, much to the chagrin of my long-suffering wife). I have always taken the approach as a reviewer that what I am trying to do is simply to point out to readers that I have come across a recording that I have found of interest, a recording that I think they might appreciate my having pointed out to them. I suppose that sounds a bit simple-minded, but I know I appreciate reading reviews by others that do the same for me — point out recordings that they think I might enjoy.

For readers who might be wondering about what kind of system I am using to do my listening, I should probably point out that I do a LOT of music listening and employ a variety of means to do so in a variety of environments, as I would imagine many music lovers also do. Starting at the more grandiose end of the scale, the system in which I do my most serious listening comprises Marantz CD 6007 and Onkyo CD 7030 CD players, NAD C 658 streaming preamp/DAC, Legacy Audio PowerBloc2 amplifier, and a pair of Legacy Audio Focus SE loudspeakers. I occasionally do some listening through pair of Sennheiser 560S headphones. I miss the excellent ELS Studio sound system in our 2016 Acura RDX (now my wife's daily driver) on which I had ripped more than a hundred favorite CDs to the hard drive, so now when driving my 2024 Honda CRV Sport L Hybrid, I stream music from my phone through its adequate but hardly outstanding factory system. For more casual listening at home when I am not in my listening room, I often stream music through a Roku Streambar Pro system (soundbar plus four surround speakers and a 10" sealed subwoofer) that has surprisingly nice sound for such a diminutive physical presence and reasonable price. Finally, at the least grandiose end of the scale, I have an Ultimate Ears Wonderboom II Bluetooth speaker and a pair of Google Pro Earbuds for those occasions where I am somewhere by myself without a sound system but in desperate need of a musical fix. I just can’t imagine life without music and I am humbly grateful for the technologies that enable us to enjoy it in so many wonderful ways.

William (Bill) Heck, Webmaster and Contributor

Among my early childhood memories are those of listening to my mother playing records (some even 78 rpm ones!) of both classical music and jazz tunes. I suppose that her love of music was transmitted genetically, and my interest was sustained by years of playing in rock bands – until I realized that this was no way to make a living. The interest in classical music was rekindled in grad school when the university FM station serving as background music for studying happened to play the Brahms First Symphony. As the work came to an end, it struck me forcibly that this was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard, and from that point on, I never looked back. This revelation was to the detriment of my studies, as I subsequently spent way too much time simply listening, but music has remained a significant part of my life. These days, although I still can tell a trumpet from a bassoon and a quarter note from a treble clef, I have to admit that I remain a nonexpert. But I do love music in general and classical music in particular, and I enjoy sharing both information and opinions about it.

The audiophile bug bit about the same time that I returned to classical music. I’ve gone through plenty of equipment, brands from Audio Research to Yamaha, and the best of it has opened new audio insights. Along the way, I reviewed components, and occasionally recordings, for The $ensible Sound magazine. Most recently I’ve moved to my “ultimate system” consisting of a BlueSound Node streamer, an ancient Toshiba multi-format disk player serving as a CD transport, Legacy Wavelet II DAC/preamp/crossover, dual Legacy PowerBloc2 amps, and Legacy Signature SE speakers (biamped), all connected with decently made, no-frills cables. With the arrival of CD and higher resolution streaming, that is now the source for most of my listening.

Ryan Ross, Contributor

I started listening to and studying classical music in earnest nearly three decades ago. This interest grew naturally out of my training as a pianist. I am now a musicologist by profession, specializing in British and other symphonic music of the 19th and 20th centuries. My scholarly work has been published in major music journals, as well as in other outlets. Current research focuses include twentieth-century symphonic historiography, and the music of Jean Sibelius, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Malcolm Arnold.

I am honored to contribute writings to Classical Candor. In an age where the classical recording industry is being subjected to such profound pressures and changes, it is more important than ever for those of us steeped in this cultural tradition to continue to foster its love and exposure. I hope that my readers can find value, no matter how modest, in what I offer here.


Bryan Geyer, Technical Analyst

I initially embraced classical music in 1954 when I mistuned my car radio and heard the Heifetz recording of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto. That inspired me to board the new "hi-fi" DIY bandwagon. In 1957 I joined one of the pioneer semiconductor makers and spent the next 32 years marketing transistors and microcircuits to military contractors. Home audio DIY projects remained a personal passion until 1989 when we created our own new photography equipment company. I later (2012) revived my interest in two channel audio when we "downsized" our life and determined that mini-monitors + paired subwoofers were a great way to mate fine music with the space constraints of condo living.

Visitors that view my technical papers on this site may wonder why they appear here, rather than on a site that features audio equipment reviews. My reason is that I tried the latter, and prefer to publish for people who actually want to listen to music; not to equipment. My focus is in describing what's technically beneficial to assure that the sound of the system will accurately replicate the source input signal (i. e. exhibit high accuracy) without inordinate cost and complexity. Conversely, most of the audiophiles of today strive to achieve sound that's euphonic, i.e. be personally satisfying. In essence, audiophiles seek sound that's consistent with their desire; the music is simply a test signal.

Mission Statement

It is the goal of Classical Candor to promote the enjoyment of classical music. Other forms of music come and go--minuets, waltzes, ragtime, blues, jazz, bebop, country-western, rock-'n'-roll, heavy metal, rap, and the rest--but classical music has been around for hundreds of years and will continue to be around for hundreds more. It's no accident that every major city in the world has one or more symphony orchestras.

When I was young, I heard it said that only intellectuals could appreciate classical music, that it required dedicated concentration to appreciate. Nonsense. I'm no intellectual, and I've always loved classical music. Anyone who's ever seen and enjoyed Disney's Fantasia or a Looney Tunes cartoon playing Rossini's William Tell Overture or Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 can attest to the power and joy of classical music, and that's just about everybody.

So, if Classical Candor can expand one's awareness of classical music and bring more joy to one's life, more power to it. It's done its job. --John J. Puccio

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"Their Master's Voice" by Michael Sowa

"Their Master's Voice" by Michael Sowa