The classical music thread

I am lucky enough to have those Böhm Mozart recordings in a big Deutsche Grammophon box (long since deleted), which has Symphonies 26 to 41 inclusive. (There was a companion box with the early Symphonies, but I opted for a similar set with smaller forces , Marriner with the ASMF on Philips.)

Towards the end of his life, Böhm re-recorded the last six or so Mozart Symphonies with the Vienna Philharmonic. Much better recordings, with conductor and orchestra clearly completely at ease and loving the music. Unaccountably, Deutsche Grammophon deleted the recordings, and they have never reappeared at mid-price or at all.

Hi graham55: Karl Böhm’s Mozart Symphonies was for many years the “go-to” set, though nowadays some of his slow tempi are frowned upon. His later Mozart-Wiener symphony recordings appeared in this box set which I purchased. It also includes, inter alia, Bruckner 7 & 8, Schubert 8 & 9, Heldenleben, Tchaikovsky 4,5 & 6. The highlights of the set, for me, are his wonderful Haydn performances of symphonies 88-90, 91 & 92. Böhm’s recordings of Haydn with the Wiener Philharmoniker were very special. He obtained an instantly recognisable sound from the Wiener orchestra which seemed to be unique to him. If you can still find this set, I strongly recommend it. Sadly I think it’s now out of print.

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Hello, and thank you, Chris. I have found and tried to buy that Böhm set (which is still available on Amazon.de), but my fr*gging Visa card has been screwed with and it appears that I won’t be able to get it fixed until I have escaped the care home where I am (increasingly unhappily) residing at present. I’ll just have to hope that the set is still there when I escape.

It must be said that Böhm was not a nice man (an ardent Nazi and a favourite of Hitler) but I allow myself to overlook that, particularly to enjoy his unmatched conducting of his own favourite composer, Mozart. (The same is true, sadly, of one of my favourite singers, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, who was notoriously the mistress of a high-ranking Nazi during WW II, although this ‘indiscretion’ tends to be airbrushed from her life story these days.)

If you will allow me to go off at a tangent, Karl Böhm formed a close association with the London Symphony Orchestra very late in his life, and was given an honorary title (President, I think) by the LSO. He was due to conduct them in concerts in Milan and London, but was forced to withdraw by (what proved to be a fatal) illness. Amazingly, and at very short notice, with little or no time for rehearsal, Carlos Kleiber agreed to conduct both concerts. I was lucky enough to hear that Kleiber would be at the Royal Festival Hall with the LSO, and I managed to get a couple of tickets (amazingly, a number of LSO patrons returned their tickets the they heard that Kleiber would be standing in for Böhm!).

I thought the concert (Weber, Schubert and Beethoven) was extraordinary, but the London press universally panned the concert, and the notoriously sensitive Kleiber vowed never to revisit London again. He also instructed Radio 3, which had recorded the concert for later broadcast, to wipe the tapes - an instruction with which Radio 3 complied, very sadly.

And so what might have begun an extraordinary relationship between conductor and orchestra was stopped in its tracks.

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Yes, Bohm was something of a nasty piece of work by all accounts, but the results he got were often superb. Sadly he was one of several conductors who wouldn’t get away with such behaviour these days; I’m thinking of Szell, Reiner and Ormandy in particular.

The set I recommend has LSO performances included of the last three Tchaikovsky symphonies.

Sadly I wasn’t able to hear the LSO/Kleiber concert. I would have loved to have been there. I spoke to someone later who got tickets and said it was one of the finest concerts he had ever attended.

The conductors whom you name were typical of their generation - they regarded themselves as demigods, and would permit no argument from members of ‘their’ orchestras, whom they would fire, sexually molest, or even sh*g (in either a homosexual or heterosexual capacity) as the fancy took them.

This appears to have been the case until comparatively recently. I think that the first conductor to be fired for this sort of behaviour was James Levine in Chicago, who had a penchant for homosexual importuning of orchestral players. Similar claims of homosexual misconduct were made during his tenure at the New York Met.

I know some of you know about the remastering of Solti’s Ring. This iconic first stereo recording of the whole of Wagner’s Ring cycle of operas was recorded in the late 50s and mid 60s. The whole enterprise is described in the recording engineer John Culshaw’s wonderful book, Ring Resounding.

Anyway Decca have remastered the original recordings and are embarked in the process of releasing them. They took the original master tapes initialled on the box in pencil by John Culshaw as approved for release and digitised them at 192/24. Some tapes were nearly unrecoverable and Decca had to bake them and harden the magnetic layer so it could be read. They are releasing them in honour of the 100th anniversary of Solti’s birth (I think that is right). The first out of the block is a highlights SACD, the Golden Ring. This was released on 28th Oct. Next is Das Rheingold on 11th November.

The releases are on Vinyl, dual layer SACD and downloads. The downloads are available in high res up to 192/24. For Presto fans like me, unfortunately they are only selling CD quality downloads. But Qobuz, if you can successfully navigate their confusing and dysfunctional interface, are selling the high res downloads too.

So I bought and downloaded the 96/24 version of the highlights disc from Qobuz. Comparing it with my rips of the original CDs, this is a great improvement. It’s like a rippled-glass window over the music had been stripped away. But a friend with a Lyra, LP12, 552, 300DR and Fact12s said my original LPs I bought 40 years ago (he has my actual LPs) sound better than the newly mastered hi res downloads through his Core and NDS.

I downloaded the highlights disc in WAV as well as FLAC and through his NDS and also through my lesser (Nova, 272 and SuoerUniti) systems the two formats sound exactly the same.

This is all very interesting and I am definitely going to buy the remastered release of Gotterdammerung in hi res in due course. In the meantime, I had forgotten how much lovely music there is in the Ring cycle, which took over my life for a year or so in my late teens, a long time ago (before I discovered girls).

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Hello, David, I posted about this new release a few weeks ago. I have the Rhinegold LPs on pre-order with Decca. (I didn’t know that this reissue was to mark the anniversary of Georg Solti’s birth - Decca seem to release the cycle on just about any pretext.) I will almost certainly buy the whole cycle afresh, but I want to compare Rhinegold with my greatly treasured Telefunken German DMM-pressed complete set from about 30 years ago.

It’s extraordinary that Decca would let the mastertapes deteriorate as you have described - they must have made so much money from the releases of the set every 10 or 15 years that you’d think they would look after the tapes properly.

Gramophone magazine famously described Solti’s Ring, a couple of decades ago now, as the greatest single achievement of the classical record industry, and nothing has happened since to change that assessment. Now if DGG had been able to get Carlos Kleiber into a studio to record ‘The Ring’ to follow up his Dresden ‘Tristan’…! We can but dream, as I think that Kleiber’s ‘Tristan’ is the greatest single recording that I own. Amazingly, DGG have let the LP set drop out f the catalogue in recent years, but it’s available on CD still.

As you suggest the origional Culshaw tapes must be close to being past their best, Along time ago.
In my teens I bought the first set of Das Rheingold and got to know it better than the other three. Decca had a way with brass which makes this part of the orchestra stand out. I have read elsewhere this was Solti instruction: no discussion!
My tally of Solti Rings apart from the above are two CD box sets and one on S/H well preserved vinyl.
A classic of the gramophone and full marks to Decca for taking what must have been a financial risk at the time.

I have to say that in general I’m happy to seperate the man from the music. In Levine’s case I have no need to do so as I’ve never heard anything musically worthwhile from his baton.

I remember reading that Decca’s decision to initiate the colossally expensive undertaking of a complete studio recording of all four of the ‘Ring’ operas (not Wagner’s term, I know) was regarded as close to financial suicide. Record industry insiders predicted that the market for the LPs would be of the order of a few hundred copies worldwide.

In retrospect, the critics were proved wrong, but the decision by John Culshaw and his bosses at Decca to forge ahead with the project was a brave one.

I suspect that a large majority of Forum Members will have absolutely no interest in listening to this lovely music. But there’s not much to lose by buying the first opera, ‘Rhinegold’. Naim equipment might have been made to play this extraordinary music, full of Norse gods, fallible humans, dragons, bridges made from rainbows. And the sound of the late 50s/early 60s Vienna Philharmonic playing their collective hearts out has to be heard to be believed. Orchestras (even in Vienna) don’t have this ‘full-fat’ sound any more - we live in an age of pasteurisation these days.

I do, though, think Bach’s choral music may appeal particularly strongly to those of a certain cast of mind. I recall the mathematician Jacob Bronowski in his TV series The Ascent of Man saying that the night before he sat his finals at Cambridge, the B minor Mass was being performed in King’s College Chapel and over half his fellow maths undergraduates attended the performance. You don’t have to be a mathematician to enjoy it, though!

Roger

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I recall Decca went from the first opera to be recorded, not the second, but the third which could have been a financial decision as much as an artistic one. Who knows?
What I do know is on side 6 of Rhinegold, LP, from the forging of the rainbow bridge hammer blow to the end is a bit of a magic 15 minutes for me.
Surely Decca would have high quality digital transfers in their archives by now. Some may not like the involvement of digits but its the only way to go after 50 odd years.
The Culshaw book is 100% on the recording story. Nothing on his personal life. In the book there is a photo of some of the team listening to playbacks. A picture of D F-D enjoying a ciggy I remember!

There was a reason why Decca recorded the operas out of sequence, but I can’t remember what it was. It may have been due to casting problems. They wanted a particular singer for one of the roles, but couldn’t sign him up, so went to (I think) Wolfgang Windgassen very much as a second choice?

If I had been able to get a copy of Culshaw’s ‘Ring Resounding’, I could tell you. Let’s hope that some enterprising publisher reissues it to coincide with the rerelease of the records.

I have no piercing insight into why Decca would let the tapes of ‘The Ring’ disintegrate. Sounds like incompetence, and it may be no more than that.

@graham55 it was your original post that first drew this to my attention. The remastering project is described on Decca’s website:

Hopefully Richard will allow that link as it’s not actually selling you the recordings. Although the live link shows up in German, if you go there then the site is also in English. It’s the 25th anniversary of Solti’s death rather than the 100th of his birth, although I imagine those two won’t be that far apart.

There is also another website which does sell the recordings, so I won’t link it. But if you type soltiring and add .com then you will find it. The most interesting thing here is the extensive guide to the leitmotivs of the Ring. But you can also see what they say about the SACD and the vinyl offerings. The only part available so far is the highlights album. But you can buy this as a download from Qobuz.

Incidentally the book Ring Resounding is available via Amazon markets from time to time. There is a copy there right now. Culshaw also write another book, an autobiography, which he called “Putting the Record Straight”. There is much more here about his personal life, written in the same style as Ring Resounding, although it kind of stops suddenly just before his final illness. I bought that via Amazon markets too, some years ago. I will look in the book later and see why they originally recorded Siegfried before Walkure and post the answer here later today.

I read about the recovering of the original tapes from another source. I forget what now. But anyway if you Google and include 2022 remastering, you can find all the references quite easily.

Thank for posting that, David. It’s very useful to bring this new release to the attention of Members. These are probably the most important set of classical records ever recorded, after all.

I’d buy the Culshaw book in an instant, but my Visa card isn’t working. That has not done much to improve my state of mind!

The reason for recording Siegfried before Walkure is discussed over about ten pages or so of Ring Resounding. But these two pages summarise the position.

Reading the book again just now, I realise how much more than a recording engineer was John Culshaw. He was the producer of the whole thing, working extremely closely with Solti and masterminding the whole scheduling and recording process, including choosing and engaging all the artists, many of whom were extremely famous and highly sought after. Fascinating.

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It’s fascinating to get that insight into what was going on behind the scenes. I will try extra hard, when I have a working credit card again, to track down copies of both John Culshaw’s books.

They wanted another very good and busy tenor and did get him under contract, but he failed over many months to put the work in to learn the part well enough and ultimately Culshaw and Solti had to abandon him. Culshaw doesn’t say what his name was, although I guess that information is in the public domain somewhere. The book explains how they got through the nightmare of abandoning one artist and securing Wolfgang Windgassen, who was truly a second choice, but Culshaw is very complimentary about the effect of having such a talented and experienced tenor singing the part of Siegfried after their original choice had stumbled unsuccessfully through the first two recording sessions. Fascinating stuff.

I have the 48/24 Audio Blu-Ray of the entire cycle, for which I paid under $60. At the time, Decca claimed that the state of the tapes was such that a 96/24 remastering made no sense. Maybe true, maybe not. But based on the price of the single disc download, this new mastering of the cycle is going to be a heck of a lot more. If Qobuz let’s me stream it, I’ll probably be satisfied.

Decca have made a 192/24 rip of all of the very original master tapes that were in a vault somewhere. The SACDs and vinyls are expensive. I think Qobuz will let you stream 192/24 if you want to.

Certainly the new remastered highlights disc is available as a 192/24 download at a price of about £20 from Qobuz. But I went for 96/24 which was about £16.

You can stream the first track or two of that download for free from Qobuz if you want to give it a go, but I think that’s only “CD quality”.

Incidentally this is what Decca say about the transfer:

“For this 2022 edition we have utilised a completely new set of high-definition 24bit/192kHz transfers of the original two-track stereo master tapes. Almost every tape box is marked “Edited & Passed: JC” where John Culshaw personally initialled each reel as passed for production. These transfers were made as part of Universal Music’s preservation project at the Arvato facility in Gütersloh, Germany. Overseen by Andrew Wedman, formerly of Emil Berliner Studios, the tapes were aligned and played on Studer A820 machines coupled with Weiss analogue to digital converters and a proprietary workstation to record the output.

Working with 38 reels of original mastertapes –some up to 65 years old and spanning seven years of recording–there were inevitably instances where some individual tapes needed edit repairs or suffered oxide shedding. Tapes in poor condition were baked for ten hours at 55°C to restore their integrity. The playback alignment was greatly helped by the fact that the first tape reel in each opera has an announcement from engineer James Brown or, in the case of Die Walküre Culshaw himself, with left/right identifiers and a series of tones to ensure the correct calibration of the tape head. Decca’s 1950s Ampex-designed AME noise reduction circuit –a precursor of the Dolby circuitry to reduce tape hiss –was not deployed such that we could use the very latest noise reduction software at the remastering stage.

The result is a set of HD transfers which are like photographic RAW files with little or no processing to create as pure a starting point as possible before remastering.”

The special set of all of the new vinyls with lithographic prints, album booklet artwork and a Blueray audio of the whole lot with Dolby Atmos is £630.

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