Is It Time for New Classic Recordings?

by Bill Heck

All right, I admit it, I confess: I'm spoiled by modern digital recordings by amazing musicians.

Many readers of Classical Candor have been around long enough to know about the "classic" recordings of classical music, the ones on any number of "recommended performances" lists. Whose collection of recordings would be complete without, say, the Reiner / Chicago recording of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra, the Kleiber / Vienna Beethoven 5 and 7 pairing, or Beecham’s conducting of anything by Delius?

I'm speaking here of stereo recordings, which puts us after the mid-1950s or so. There are specialists, as well as the more curious among us, who want to hear Toscanini's Beethoven symphony cycle, or Schnabel's set of the piano concertos, recordings of Rachmaninoff playing his own works: the list goes on and on, and for those folks, even bad recordings are better than no recordings at all. But for most of us most of the time, those recorded sounds are just too ancient: not only monophonic, but compressed, distorted, with too much tape hiss to be passable. But hey, those RCAs from the '50s, those Mercury Living Presence disks, the remasterings and repressings of analog recordings: sure, bring them on!

Vladimir Horowitz

But lately I'm noticing more and more that…I'm spoiled. That analog sound that seemed so wonderful in the 1970s, maybe even into the 2000's, is starting to wear thin. When I listen to digital recordings from the last couple of decades through to the present, I notice that there are things missing: noise and hiss, the tiny speed variations of analog tape that let the pitch waver*, dynamic compression and even distortion, and so on. Oh sure, there are a few analog recordings that are incredibly good, but they generally don't sound quite as crystal clear, with quite the "silent silences" or quite the deep bass impact that I find in good digital recordings. Naturally, those of us who grew up with analog recordings took a while to get used to the absence of background hiss, which can sound disconcerting at first, or the impossibly low distortion, which can sound less lively and dynamic until you get used to it. But once your ears adjust to the super clean sound of the best digital, those old analog recordings start to sound rather grungy.

(Time for a brief digression: the discussion so far is sure to attract disputation – or should I say vilification? – from those convinced that analog recordings, despite their obvious restrictions, somehow sound "better" than any digital ones possibly could. I can't think of anything to say that would change the minds of those who take that position. The technical data apparently won't, nor will the fact that most mainstream performance available today in “analog” format have been digitized somewhere along the way anyway. We can just agree to disagree and move on.)

Now all this would be moot if, for much music, we simply had no substitutes for those classic performances of yesteryear. But as new recordings of huge parts of the classical repertoire pile up, many of them made by phenomenally talented musicians, simple statistics suggests that sooner or later there will be recordings that are every bit as wonderful and satisfying as those gems from the past. I yield to no one in my admiration for the achievements of legendary conductors, orchestras, chamber groups, and soloists from the time when I was a mere pup. But to suppose that their artistic achievements never will be equaled is a poor bet.

Fritz Reiner

So by all means, check out the acknowledged masterworks from the heyday of analog stereo. You deserve to hear how Szell, Munch, Klemperer, and Mravinsky conducted** or how Rubinstein, Horowitz, and Fleisher played. I also admit, quite cheerfully, that some of my go-to recordings still are those classics, ones on which the virtues of the performance are so amazing that they outweigh any other considerations. But the number of those "matchless" classics keeps shrinking as I discover alternatives. For all of us, there should come a time when we start updating – or let's say "evolving" – our "recommended recordings" lists: as we find newer, world class performances that treat us to modern sound, maybe now is that time. And when you are choosing your "daily driver" recordings, the ones that you come back to when you just want to enjoy a favorite work, keep in mind that you often can have great performance plus great sound; no need to settle for just one.

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* This effect usually is subtle, almost subliminal, and rarely noticeable on recordings of orchestras or where strings predominate. But try comparing analog to digital recordings of a piano with its rock solid pitches. Once you do hear that subtle wobble, you can’t unhear it.

** By the way, those classic orchestral recordings of decades past, as opposed to recordings of solo instrumentalists or chamber groups, may be the ones least likely to be equaled by more recent performances. That's not because those older musicians were uniquely talented, but because modern orchestras may not have as much rehearsal time available to hone their performances.