Gulda is not a showy performer. I would urge you to give it a few more listens.
Those two LPs with Abbado and Gulda are among my favourite Mozart concerto discs.
But, I suppose, we all respond to different things.
I may try again Graham. Maybe.
Perplexed and thinking something was amiss with me or my system I searched the web for relevant reviews and found this review from Bryce Morrison in Gramophone:
“ Here, taken live from Munich in 1986, is Mozart played and conducted by music’s ultimate maverick. It was, after all, Friedrich Gulda who, after completing his Carnegie Hall Beethoven recitals, retired gratefully to New York’s Birdland jazz club, jamming away into the small hours. For him, classical music was dead, jazz the future of music, though his own brand of jazz pleased neither radicals nor conservatives. His attempt to rejuvenate what he considered a moribund art included a concert given in the nude and a ‘resurrection’ recital after his supposed death.
Such potted biography springs to mind when you observe Gulda with his strange hat and even stranger manner offering performances sufficiently po-faced to suggest contempt rather than affection for his chosen composer. It is almost as if colour, nuance and tonal variety would be an unwarrantable concession to an outmoded sentimentality. His first entry in Concerto No 20 is bleak and metronomic and his way with the supposedly festive, tirelessly virtuosic Coronation Concerto reduces its scintillating wit and charm to basic Czerny.”
Yup. That’s what I heard too.
Ultimately, I suppose that we all respond to things differently.
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Absolutely Graham. It’s music, an art form designed to invoke a response from the listener. There are no absolute rights or wrongs. That’s the wonder of it I guess. I apologise for being so categorical and absolute in my assessment - inappropriate when we are discussing the appreciation of art. Gulda speaks to you and you hear him in a way that I’m unable to. That’s my issue.
Do you have this OS reissue btw? If you like the performances then you’ll love this. The sound is superb!
If you are talking what’s on Qobuz we are not talking about the same thing. I have an OG on vinyl. My comment about the bass refers specifically to the new DG Classics The Original Series AAA vinyl remastered from the original 4-track tape that just came out. This new remaster is very different from the original master, and that’s where it now has great bass: drums, strings, everything.
One other thing. In “Vltava” [Die Moldau] it’s not the Timpani pressurizing my room with bass. Those are big concert bass drums. 
I like the Gulda recording so far (one listen), but as performances go I still really enjoy my decades old Philips box set of the Mozart piano concertos with Alfred Brendel and Marriner/Academy of St. Martin-In-The-Fields.
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Hi, I wonder if there should have been an attachment?
I have a number of the OS reissues, and have been very impressed. The Kleiber Vienna Beethoven Seventh is wonderful, and seems to have sold out - but that was inevitable with only 1,600 LP copies pressed.
The soundtrack to the famous ‘Amadeus’ film has piano concertos recorded by the ASMF, but with Ivan Moravec at the piano. I bought as many of his recordings as I could, as a result.
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I guess it’s moving off topic a little but I still greatly enjoy my DG vinyl box set of the Mozart concertos performed by Geza Anda. I picked up the box set almost forty years ago in a provincial record store that was closing down.
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The poignant Romanze (PC No.20) was played by Imogen Cooper.
It was played during the end credit which It became one of the most brilliant ending I have ever experienced.
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And it’s an absolutely classic set. I grew up listening to LPs from the set, as my parents had a copy.
I agree with you about Gulda: no sense of internal development in my opinion.
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Something very strange and eventually unpleasant: they start K. 466 in an interestingly slow tempo, so all the way through the first and second movement you can’t wait to hear how a slowly played third would sound like - and then they speed up to the usual tempo, as played by everyone else ever since.
A waste of time.
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Today I listened to Symphonies #4 #5 and #6 of Semyon Bychkov’s complete cycle with the Czech Philharmonic. This isn’t desert island music for me (although sections like the opening of the second movement of the 5th are unmissable), but Bychkov makes sense of these symphonies like few before (the first one since Mravinsky if I’m honest), and the orchestra’s distinctive sound is just gorgeous and excellently captured.
Cheers
EJ
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It costs more than the actual value of my turntable! I think I stick to my Qobuz version.
OK, I see, but then we are comparing apples to oranges when you relate your Qobuz version to my new analog reissue. I was talking specifically about the new Original Source Series reissue from DG Classics, which is mastered from the original four-track analog tapes.
The new analog reissue really has little relevance to what you find on Qobuz (or elsewhere for digital reissues), at least in terms of the sound quality I was talking about. Any digital version is mastered from a different source that originated with the old and inferior two-track copy tapes.
I have both analog versions of the Smetana. The original, on which your Qobuz version is also based is rather lacking in bass/mids and can be a bit shrill in the treble. That’s typical poor mastering quality of DG recordings for the 70s, although the Smetana is better than many DGs of the era in that regard. The new master is very different. The treble is more balanced and the bass/mid is significantly better. Soundstage and ambient cues are also much better. It’s a night and day difference from the original.
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I don’t think that there will ever be a conductor as good as Mravinsky in Tchaikovsky’s Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Symphonies. It’s silly that you can’t buy those records at present.
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I’ve looked everywhere that I can think of, but have not been able to find a current release of the Mravinsky Tchaikovsky LPs.
Plenty of used vinyl.
Why limit to the new records which usually sound poorer than the original ( albeit in mint )
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