On rereading my post, I realise that I have managed somehow to leave out J S Bach, which is unforgivable.
Bach wrote more choral masterpieces than any other composer, before or since. Unfortunately, I don’t have any formal musical education, so some of Bach’s technical sublimity passes me by unnoticed.
That’s right WW. The Kertesz is well known to be a great rendition, but I don’t think that’s the real difference. It was down to format.
Have you tried Bach’s b-minor mass? An absolute masterpiece and one you really don’t need any musical education to appreciate. Check out Herreweghe, Suzuki or Gardiner for example, or alternatively if you don’t like historically informed ensembles the classical recording from Karl Richter.
To answer as truthfully as I dare, I would love to listen properly to Bach’s Masses, but I fear that I don’t have the necessary musical grounding.
I love later Masses such as Mozart’s Requiem (to the extent that it is Wolfgang’s work at all - but we’ve all seen ‘Amadeus’ and read Robbins Landon’s ‘1791’, one of the best books about a great composer that I know), Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis (Klemperer is monumental, but in danger of coming across as marmoreal), and the masterpiece that is Verdi’s Requiem (of which my favourite recording is an unfashionable old DGG recording by Fricsay in Berlin), which is in truth grand opera of the grandest scale masquerading as religious music. Fauré’s Requiem is sublime (particularly in its earlier, less heavily scored original attempt), and I grapple with Britten’s own account of his own War Requiem on Decca, but I haven’t got there yet.
But still Bach’s masterpieces scare me. I’m trying to get there by listening to some of my favourite Cantatas (the ancient EMI recording of ‘Ich Habe Genug’ with Hans Hotter, the great Wotan of his day, is incredibly moving).
I may get there with Bach Masses one day. But I tell myself that about Yes’s ‘Tales From Topographical Oceans’, and that still repels me 40 years’ on.
I personally find the b-minor Mass much more accessible than for example the Missa Solemnis, a piece that I still don’t ”get” in spite of loving Beethoven since my early childhood.
Maybe just try the “Et in terra pax” as a starter? It’s my favorite part of the entire mass, so calming and beautiful.
For a scaled down, more intimate, one singer per part performance, try this. It may be easier to digest…
Great sound recording (Linn) too…
For me (and I think a lot of other folks) Bach’s Mass in b Minor is by far his greatest contribution to the genre. (It’s not a Requiem though.)
You might find Bach’s St Matthew Passion and St. John Passion more inviting. First of all, they tell stories. If that perspective interests you, you might want to watch the Simon Rattle/Berlin Philharmonic/Peter Sellars performance. Here’s a brief excerpt.
While the production has sparked controversy (there was a recent thread about their St. John Passion), it was the musical event of the year when it came to NYC. Disclosure - I did not attend - but I am reminded that there is a video.
As for the Cantatas, have you tried any one voice per part performances? I am a big fan of the recordings of Montreal Baroque.
Another incredibly engaging piece of vinyl. I can imagine that many fans of recent digital recordings might prefer smaller orchestral forces, but the engaging, reverberant acoustic and ‘real’ timing on offer here is a gripping experience. Bohm was commanding and these Deutsche Gramophone recordings sound so much better than Karajan/BPO era recordings.
No idea why that is…(?)
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.
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.
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).
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
