Records and Recording: Good Engineering in the Service of Good Music [Issue No. 12]

Records & Recording: Good Engineering in the Service of Good Music -- Recent CD's from the Record Companies That Know How to Do It: Delos ; Denon ; Digital Music Products (dmp) ; Dorian Recordings ; Reference Recordings ; Sheffield Lab.

This is one column your Editor would gladly assign to outside reviewers; the problem is that the most perceptive music critics seem to have little patience with the subtle difference between good, better and best in audio quality, whereas connoisseurs of the latter are too often naive on the subject of musical values. Until that dilemma is resolved, our readers are stuck with the obvious compromise at hand.

Good Engineering in the Service of Good Music: Recent CD's from the Record Companies That Know How to Do It

No, I have not forsaken analog LP's altogether. I do confess to a strong leaning toward CD's, however, because of their vastly greater convenience (no small matter!), wider dynamic range, freedom from hiss/clicks/pops, cleaner bass, superior physical stability and durability, and just plain higher fidelity. It would have to be an extraordinary analog LP to get me excited these days. Those who fiercely proclaim the continuing supremacy of analog recording and the phonograph appear to me almost as strange and bewildering today as, say, flat-earth cultists or flagellants. Do these people hear something totally different from what I and thousands of other audio professionals hear? Do they have their nostalgia, their loyalties, their resentments, their peer-group pressures where their ears should be? I am not talking about specially engineered, 30-inch per-second, extra-wide-track analog master tape vs. the standard Sony, JVC or Mitsubishi digital master tape. That kind of comparison might still tip the scales in favor of the analog recording, although I doubt it. What I am talking about is the finished, packaged, off-the-shelf consumer product, LP vs. CD. No comparison there.

In the last issue, I focused on Delos International as a prime example of a good-music label with state-of-the-art engineering, viz. the work of John Eargle. In this issue, I am covering a wider sampling of comparably worthy labels with different repertoires and engineering styles, represent ed by recent (or at least not too old) releases.

Delos

Alphabetical order rather than favoritism is my reason for leading off with the latest from Delos and John Eargle, in further confirmation of the views expressed in my last column (to which the reader is referred for background information).

"The King of Instruments: a Listener's Guide to the Art and Science of Recording the Organ" (ten selections by J.S. Bach, Buxtehude, Messin, etc., from the recent Delos catalog). Delos DICD 3503 (made in 1988).

For the serious organ-music lover, this is strictly a sampler to facilitate buying decisions. For the audio freak with a when-you've-heard-one-you've-heard-them-all view of Bach fugues, it may well be all the organ music he will ever need for window-rattling demos.

The ten selections are from nine different Delos CD's and represent nine different organs and churches. The sound is awesome, with incredible definition of the sub bass line, stupendous dynamics and superb rendering of the various reverberant spaces; I am unaware of better organ recordings than these. John Eargle, himself an organist, was the recording engineer and producer of all but one of the albums represented; his technical/musical program notes are worth reading, as usual.

The greatest composer in the collection is unquestionably Bach ("Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" and "Prelude and Fugue in D Major"), but the most impressive organist is probably the young Pennsylvanian, Michael Farris, whose Marcel Dupré selection is from his new "French Fireworks" symphonic organ recital (Delos D/CD 3049). His technique is digital all right-and metatarsal.

Richard Wagner: The Flying Dutchman, Overture; Lohengrin, Prelude to Act I and Prelude to Act III; Parsifal, Prelude to Act I, Prelude to Act Ill, Good Friday Spell. Seattle Symphony Orchestra, Gerard Schwarz, conductor. Delos DICD 3053 (made in 1988).

The title of this CD is actually "Wagner 2" to distinguish it from the first Delos collection of Wagner excerpts played by the same forces, which was John Eargle's earliest effort in the Delos digital/symphonic series and not quite on the same level of sonic excellence as later productions. This one is. All the spatial, textural and dynamic qualities I enthused about in my last column are here, with the difference that Wagner's sonorities are generally not as phonogenic (CD-genic?) as those of his orchestrational heir, Richard Strauss. As an orchestral demo, I would still pick the Schwarz Zarathustra, but Parsifal is greater music and its sound is as perfectly captured here as the current state of the art allows.

In performance, the Parsifal excerpts, which take up well over half of the CD, are not quite in the same league with those recorded by Toscanini for RCA in 1949 (in somewhat deficient mono)-admittedly a purely personal yardstick of mine and not very contemporary at that. The Old Man made Wagner sound like a composer of Beethoven-sized stature, which he was, not like the father of movie music, which he also was. The tautness and plasticity of line, the unfailing grasp of overall structure, the balance of main themes and inner voices, the dramatic inflection of crucial phrases in Toscanini's Wagner are missing from Schwarz's still quite beautiful but laxer, more episodic, more coloristic performances. A startling difference can be heard in the announcement of the "Faith" motif in the Act I prelude, where the trumpets seem to be blown by synchro nous archangels in the NBC Symphony Orchestra, making you sit bolt upright; by comparison ex-trumpeter Schwarz's players sound much too polite in the same passage. A similar contrast is discernible in the rip-roaring Act III prelude from Lohengrin, which Schwarz conducts with almost as much panache as Toscanini (in another mono recording for RCA, 1951 and cleaner), except that the Seattle trombones are too round, smooth and recessive-and not because of John Eargle, I think. On the same old LP, Toscanini's Act I prelude from Lohengrin is again steadier, more cohesive and more subtly inflected than Schwarz's, not surprisingly since the piece anticipates Parsifal in mood, although with out the latter's ultimate refinement of the Wagnerian idiom.

The much earlier, Weber-like Dutchman overture, on the other hand, is conducted with tremendous flair and great virtuosity by Schwarz, who seems to be at his best when lots of snap and large reserves of energy are called for.

Regardless of my small reservations, I recommend this CD to all audiophilic Wagnerites as one of the very few satisfying high-tech documentations of the Wagner sound.

Denon Nippon Columbia, the company behind the Denon label, seems to be vertically integrated for digital audio, making their own professional and consumer hardware as well as software. The technological sophistication you would expect as a result is quite evident in the sound of the Denon symphonic and operatic productions, which for some years have been recorded with a very elegant method of microphone deployment. Two closely spaced Bruel & Kjaer 4006 omnidirectional condenser units, at a carefully researched optimum location, are the stereo reference pair.

For certain pieces of music nothing else is used, the two microphone preamp outputs going directly into the digital tape recorder-total purism-but, as all audio professionals know deep down, that works only sometimes. Usually, to delineate the complexities of a larger work and to define in space a larger body of performers, there is no escape from additional mikes. When these are used, Denon adds exactly as much digital delay to their outputs as will normalize all time/phase relationships to the location of the main stereo pair, making the latter appear to have the magic capability of picking up all the specially miked detail from the ideal "one-point" stereo position. A neat trick, at least in theory.

Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 8. Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, Eliahu Inbal, conductor; seven combined choruses and eight soloists. Denon 60CO-1564/65 (two CD's, made in 1987).

This is supposed to be the ultimate, state-of-the-art embodiment of the Denon digital-delay microphone technique; apparently they deliberately planned this, the most massive and complex Mahler opus, to be recorded last in the Inbal/Frankfurt series of Mahler symphonies so that the latest updates and highest refinement of the system could be applied to the task. It works-the recording leaves little or nothing to be desired in the way of clarity, detail, dimensionality, dynamic range and just plain clean sound. Quite an achievement, considering that the microphones were registering the acoustic output of some 700 performers, occasionally blasting forth all at once (but still short of the 1029 at the world premiere in 1910). For the first time any where in the world, the new Bruel & Kjaer 4011 cardioids were used (22 of them!) to supplement the main 4006 omni pair with digitally delayed close-ups, accents and sweetenings. The renovated Alte Oper in Frankfurt seems to have highly suitable acoustics for this kind of structured audio orgy; overall, however, I have no sonic yardstick against which to measure this unique recording. John Eargle's more pragmatic, less Japan-o-technocratic approach at Delos yields perhaps a more vivid orchestral panorama, but that is an apples-and-oranges comparison; Delos never had quite such a big fish to fry-if I may mix my alimentary metaphors.

As for performance, Inbal's Mahler is more of the subtle, nuanced school (e.g., Jascha Horenstein) than of the powerhouse persuasion (e.g., Solti), and I heartily endorse that, especially in what B.H. Haggin once called "the ranting later symphonies," where I tend to get lost among all the climaxes and perorations. (I must confess to a currently unfashionable propensity to skip from the 5th directly to Das Lied von der Erde in my chronological Mahler preferences.) Inbal focuses on the thematic felicities, ingeniously original textures and sophisticated tempo changes of the symphonies, letting the ranting come naturally when it comes. That saves me from being bored to death by this monstrous musical exegesis of the unreadable and un-stageable parts of Goethe's Faust, which of course Mahler worshipped. (Gounod, being French, knew better.) If this were not an audio-oriented journal, I would have reviewed Inbal's beautifully conducted and recorded 5th instead, on Denon 33C0O-1088. So it has no B&K 4011's...

Digital Music Products (dmp) If T had to name a single non-classical label best suited for audio demonstrations on the basis of its typical releases, it would have to be this one. Tom Jung, the perfectionist founder, guiding light and recording engineer of dmp, leans heavily toward trendy New York studio musicians and new-wave jazzmen in his choice of program material, which he records "live to 2-track" with esoteric micro phones (handmade ribbons, special B&K's, etc.) through Cello class-A electronics. The result is the most uncanny clarity and impact I have ever heard in small-ensemble recording. Advanced technology, when combined with total dedication and a truly good ear, leadeth to audio heaven.

Warren Bernhardt: "Hands On." Nine tracks, each featuring Warren Bernhardt, piano, solo or with acoustic/electric instruments. dmp CD-457 (made in 1987).

Warren Bernhardt is an excellent pianist, with a classical technique and a fine ear for jazz. He is the composer of all but one of the selections recorded; his style could be described as restrained, elegant, lyrical, but not without drive. This is contemporary jazz and not really my personal cup of tea, having been raised on a much more low-down, funky, bluesy tradition, but I appreciate the high level of musicianship displayed by Bernhardt and his seven side men, and the sound is a whole order of magnitude cleaner, sweeter, more dynamic and simply more accurate than that of ordinarily good jazz CD's. Tom Jung's recording of the two different Steinways used could be the model for classical piano albums at a number of major record companies I could name. Great job.

Thom Rotella Band. Fourteen tracks, featuring Thom Rotella on acoustic and electric guitars, with other acoustic/electric instruments. dmp CD-460 (made in 1987).

This contemporary jazz group is into sonorities and textures which are occasionally startling but tend to grow on you. If you want to astonish your friends with the resolving power of your super system, this is a good CD to play for them. All kinds of sudden transients as well as various swishy, tinkly and rattly flourishes, all captured with the utmost precision. Check out "Little Chubby" on track 10, for example, or "Friends" on track 12. The irony is that Thom Rotella and his band used to be 24-track overdub freaks until Tom Jung proved to them that he can achieve a better sound with live to 2-track. Their music is not some thing that makes me want to trade in my memories of Lester Young blowing in a dingy, smoke-filled Paris cellar (there I go again, apples and oranges, but what oranges!), but it is skillful, sophisticated and highly listenable. Now, if only Tom Jung would start to record with this kind of fidelity some of the fading, grizzled, half-forgotten jazz greats who hang out at places like Fat Tuesday's in New York, before they are gone forever...

Dorian Recordings

Craig Dory, the technical and musical mastermind behind this new classical label, is another purist/perfection ist, almost to the point of obsession. He dislikes just about all off-the-shelf microphones, electronics and digital tape recorders, preferring to work with specially modified, one of-a-kind equipment, and he is as much against any kind of signal processing as he is in favor minimal miking. The results are, well, Natural-still the highest word of praise in audio, when you think about it, and in this case with a capital N. The entire Dorian operation is now headquartered in Troy, New York, and its principal recording studio is the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall, one of the acoustically finest concert halls in the world according to many experts (including the late George Szell) but fallen into total disuse until a recent rescue effort. The combination of Craig Dory and the TSBMH shows every promise of producing world class recordings, especially since his musical standards are also obviously high.

"Christmas in Leipzig." JS. Bach: Cantata No. 63 (Christen, dtzet diesen Tag in Metall und Marmorsteine!); Cantata No. 65 (Sie werden aus Saba alle kommen); Sanctus, from the Mass in B Minor (BWV 232). The Bach Choir of Bethlehem & Bach Festival Orchestra, Greg Funfgeld, conductor; Sylvia McNair, soprano; Janice Taylor, contralto; David Gordon, tenor; Daniel Lichti, bass. Dorian DOR-90113 (made in 1988).

If you like your Bach choral works in the grand Ger man tradition rather than reconstructed, authenticated and antiqued, this will please you. Scholarly modern research has reestablished the probable sound of Bach a quarter of a millennium ago; what no musicologist can tell us is whether or not a resurrected Johann Sebastian would approve of the late-nineteenth-century sound of the Bethlehem group and maybe wish he had had the same resources. I am totally neutral on the subject; to me the musicality of phrasing and the beauty of sound, not its century of origin, are what count, and these performance are highly musical as well as gorgeous-sounding. The soloists are pretty good to very good; the choir and orchestra better than that. (No, there is no harpsichord.) The Cantata No. 63 is actually an early Weimar work but was probably never performed until Bach''s first Christmas in Leipzig, followed by the then new No. 65 on Epiphany. Both are among his finest pieces.

The sound of Craig Dory's digital recording is utterly remarkable. This is probably the smoothest, most edgeless, least fatiguing large-ensemble CD I have auditioned so far, and yet the trumpets and strings have excellent bite and presence, the soloists' top notes come through free and easy, and the choir is very palpably "there," properly located in a definable space (not the TSBMH, though). All that compulsive finickiness about equipment has obviously paid off. The only small quibble I have is that the German words of the choir are not always clear, perhaps because of the puristic eschewal of accent microphones. Overall, though, I cannot think of a better antidote to digitophobia than Bach cum-Dory. Eat your hearts out, analog diehards.

Reference Recordings

This label needs no introduction to music lovers with exacting audio standards; for about twelve years now it has been the source of outstanding material of-you said it- reference quality, mostly analog but more recently digital as well, mostly classical but far from exclusively. J. Tamblyn Henderson, Jr., the company's exceptionally dedicated president/producer, and "Professor" Keith O. Johnson, famed recording engineer and RR's technological con science, both have fairly obvious TWAD ("tree-worshiping analog druid"-see elsewhere in this issue) tendencies, but it is to their eternal credit that when the time came they faced the facts of life, deployed a KOJ-modified Sony PCM-701ES digital encoder and taped some magnificent digital masters for CD. Tam has repeatedly assured me that the analog LP versions of the same releases, recorded on the Prof's handbuilt "focused-gap" analog tape machine, are even better, but what else would you expect a TWAD to say? I am perfectly happy with his never CD's, which of course incorporate the same magic Johnson microphone techniques as the LP's.

"Nojima Plays Liszt." Franz Liszt: Mephisto Waltz #1, La campanella, Harmonies du soir, Feux follets, Sonata in B Minor. Minoru Nojima, piano. Reference Recordings RR-25CD (made in 1987).

I am about to go out on a limb here, not because I am brave and idealistic but because I see no possibility of the limb breaking. Before this century is over-and there are 12 years left-the name of Nojima will be a household word in classical music circles, comparable to those of Schnabel, Rubinstein, Gieseking and Horowitz. Only his apparent lack of publicity hunger could possibly make a liar of me, but he is at least not microphone-shy, as Prof. John son's superb recording proves. He is, however, distrustful of commercial sound, hence his choice of Reference Recordings for his first American release-a tremendous coup for RR and great good fortune for all of us who are not of the pianistic underground or inner circle, which knew about him all along. (Remember, this Japanese artist is no youngster; there is no biographical information available, but he could be 38 or 40 or thereabouts.) The reason for my boundless enthusiasm is that the man's technique is so stupendous, so completely secure, that all of his energies, his entire inner being, can be placed at the service of musical expression- rhythm, tempo, phrasing, dynamics and color-without constraint, and then, to clinch it, he is a musician of aristocratic taste and great sensitivity, one might say a samurai of the piano in his combination of power, truthfulness and simple grace. Most pianists, including some famous ones, are happy if they can get through these diabolically difficult Liszt pieces without sounding awkward or uptight. Nojima makes them sing as if they were by Mozart with just a few extra notes thrown in. Amazing. He impresses me even more than Lazar Berman on two 1976 Columbia/Melodiya LP's in a similar program because his virtuosity is just as great but more controlled and his interpretation more sophisticated. Of course, Liszt is not considered the acid test of interpretive musicianship (although the sonata is a very serious and beautiful work, and this is a spellbinding performance of it), but Nojima is said to be superb in the Schubert posthumous sonatas and also a great Debussy and Ravel specialist. I can hardly wait for his next release- when, oh when, RR? The recording is outstandingly fine; its basic sound is apparently the result of a pair of Coles figure-eight ribbon microphones in a Blumlein configuration, but there were also some ambience omnis mixed in. The piano, a Hamburg Steinway, is life-sized (at least through my bridged Boulder 500's, each swinging 70 volts into the load), very incisive yet warm in sonority and precisely located in just the right amount of space. Some tracks were recorded with the piano lid propped up all the way, others with the lid removed; I have no clear preferences as the textures of the pieces vary considerably. I still prefer Tom Jung's piano recording technique at dmp by a slight margin-he makes the instrument even more palpable-but the comparison may not be fair when the music differs so greatly. There is, at any rate, somewhat more hiss than I like in the RR digital recording, probably originating from the microphone electronics, and one or two keys sound just a teeny bit out of tune now and then. Even so, I wish all current piano recordings were as dynamic and spacious, as clean-edged yet sweet-sounding as this. A landmark album, without a doubt.

Vivaldi, Bach. Antonio Vivaldi: Sinfonia in C (RV 116), Trio Sonata in G Minor, Op. 1, No. 1 (RV 73), Concerto in E-flat (RV 515); J.S. Bach: Prelude in C (WTC Book 1), Trio Sonata in C (BWV 1037), Concerto in D Minor (BWV 1043). Helicon Foundation, Albert Fuller, artistic director, harpsichord; Jaap Schréder, violin; Stanley Ritchie, violin; Linda Quan, violin; Nelva TeBrake and Ryan Brown, violins; Judson Griffin, viola; Myron Lutzke, violoncello; Michael Willens, violone. Reference Recordings RR 23CD (made in 1987).

To balance my remarks above about traditional vs. musicological Bach performances, I must come out in favor of the Helicon group's highly authentic, original-instrument performances of the Baroque masters because they are so clean, vigorous, musical and exhilarating. Rhythm and ictus are all-important in the motor-energetic works of Vivaldi and Bach, and these gifted artists know exactly where, when and how much to stress the right note, without sacrificing beauty of tone. They are a delight to listen to; they also prove to me that the Bach concerto for two violins is a very great piece of music (as if I had never suspected it).

The recording is super transparent, with tremendous presence but no edginess; some might say it is flat in acoustic perspective because the back wall is not a mile behind the musicians, but with only eight instruments playing Bach I want to hear the counterpoint, not the floor plan of the hall, so I like them all up front. There is some low-level hall rumble in the silent intervals (traffic noises?), but so what.

This one gets played a lot in my sound room.

Sheffield Lab The granddaddy of audiophile record companies constitutes a special case in the digital era. Originally they fought against the new technology tooth and nail; Doug Sax called it "musically disastrous" and wrote angry letters on the subject to everyone he thought might listen, including me. Later they faced the facts of the marketplace and began to run simultaneous analog and digital tapes at their recording sessions, except that the resulting CD's did not sound nearly as good as the LP's (e.g., Amanda McBroom's West of Oz), almost as if to prove to the world how right they had been in the first place. Today they are singing (and taping) another tune. Keith Johnson (yes, Reference Recordings' wizardly Professor) is doing some of their sessions; their latest CD's are excellent; they are even among the very first record companies offering prerecorded DAT samplers.

Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.

"The Moscow Sessions." Works by Barber, Copland, Gershwin, Glazunov, Glinka, Griffes, Ives, Mussorgsky, Piston, Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky. The Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra, Lawrence Leighton Smith, conductor (in the Russian works), Dmitri Kitayenko, conductor (in the American works). Sheffield Lab CD-25, CD 26 and CD-27 (made in 1987).

The idea apparently came from Kavi Alexander, a somewhat eccentric Indian whom I know quite well, not only as a devotee of my bad jokes but also as a single minded purist in the recording arts as well as Sao Win's right-hand man at Win Research in California. I have no idea how many avatars the idea went through, but in the end it emerged as a détente or glasnost gesture: the great Moscow Philharmonic would play American works under its own conductor, Dmitri Kitayenko, and Russian works under Lawrence Smith, regular conductor of the Louisville (Kentucky) Orchestra. Professor Johnson was borrowed from Reference Recordings to bring his microphones, mixing console, etc., and tape it all on both analog and digital recorders, live to 2-track. (Ironically, the Russians have only recently graduated to the glories of multitrack.) As the "large hall" of the U.S.S.R. State Television and Radio in Moscow is a good one, and Keith Johnson is a master recordist, the sonic results are at least very good and sometimes excellent, but I hear an ever so slight veil over everything compared to Johnson's best domestic work. Is it possible that the digital encoder used here, Sheffield Lab's modified JVC, does something funny that the stateside KOJ-modified Sony does not? I have no idea. The dynamic and spatial qualities of the Moscow recordings, on the other hand, leave very little to be desired; overall they provide highly satisfactory listening.

The performances are all extremely competent; it would be too much to expect Kitayenke's rendition of peculiarly American classics to be highly idiomatic, but they are very meticulously presented, with truly beautiful orchestral playing; Smith, on the other hand, is obviously at - ease in most of the Russian chestnuts. One of the latter, the Tchaikovsky 5th Symphony, happens to be close to my heart despite my lifelong overexposure to it, and I just love this recording. Smith plays it absolutely straight-not for him the famous Mengelberg dictum that "in Tchaikovsky, everysing a little exagéré"-and yet the Russian musicians respond to him with the kind of affection and bravura they reserve for their own national favorites. The result is truly exciting; the Russian brasses have a more forward, less rounded or golden quality than their Western counterparts, bordering on coarseness, but wonderfully appropriate to this kind of music-a kind of celestial marching-band sound. I revel in it; this is what Tchaikovsky's unabashedly large-scale music is all about. See if you agree with me.

By Peter Aczel Editor and Publisher

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[adapted from TAC, Issue No. 12]

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Also see:

Box 978: Letters to the Editor

Various audio and high-fidelity magazines