More Classical and Orchestral Music
More Orchestral Spectaculars
- Killer Living Stereo sound for this classic 1957 Decca-engineered album, with both sides earning Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them
- This recording is overflowing with the kind of rich, spacious, Tubey Magical sound that can only be found on vintage vinyl
- Cyril Windebank was the engineer – you may remember him from SXL 2012, the legendary recording of Peer Gynt with Fjelstad
- The most energetic performances we heard, with sound like nothing else we played – Agoult’s overtures are in a league of their own
- Classic Records did this title back in the 90s and it was as mediocre and unsatisfying as most of their sorry releases
- Marks in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these vintage LPs – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you
- “Suppé certainly has a knack for a good tune, well suited to even the most unpolished of brass band arrangements – the characterful orchestral playing, however, brings these neglected works to life with aplomb.”
- If you’re a fan of orchestral showpieces such as these, this Living Stereo from 1959 belongs in your collection.
- To see Living Stereo titles with Hot Stampers, click here. To see the 200+ Living Stereo titles we’ve reviewed, click here.
When this 1957 recording was first released, you could only buy it in mono, under the title Overtures… In Spades! It would be two years before the stereo pressing was available through RCA. There are two covers and I believe we have Shaded Dog pressings with both. This copy, our Shootout Winner, has the first cover you see in the listing.
Everyone needs a good album of Overtures – the music is exciting and fun, not to mention Demonstration Quality on a pressing such as this. The combination of sound and performance on the best of the RCA Shaded Dog pressings could not be equaled.
What The Best Sides Of Agoult’s Definitive Readings Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear
- The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
- The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1957
- Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
- Natural tonality in the midrange — with all the instruments having the correct timbre
- Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space
No doubt there’s more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.
String Tone
The rich, textured, rosin-on-the-bow lower strings on this record are to die for. Find me a modern record that sounds like this and I will eat it. And by “modern record” we hasten to include both modern recordings and modern remasterings of older recordings. No one alive today can make a record that sound even remotely as good as this. To call it a lost art is to understand something that few vinyl-loving audiophiles appear to have grasped since the advent of the modern reissue, which is simply this: they can’t begin to compete.
After decades of trying, and literally hundreds of failed examples, the engineers of today have yet to make a record that sounds as powerful and life-like as this London from over sixty years ago.
Fortunately for the both of us, we are not trying to make a record that sounds the way this one does. We’re just trying to find one, and folks, we found the hell out of this one.
What We’re Listening For On Overture Overture
- Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
- The Big Sound comes next — wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
- Then transient information — fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
- Next: transparency — the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
- Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing — an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.
Table Setup
This is an excellent record for adjusting tracking weight, VTA, azimuth and the like. Classical music is really the ultimate test for proper turntable/arm/cartridge setup (and evaluation). A huge and powerful recording such as this quickly separates the men from the boys stereo-wise. Recordings of this quality are the reason there are $10,000+ front ends in the first place. You don’t need to spend that kind of money to play this record, but if you do, this is the record that will show you what you got for your hard-earned dough.
Ideally, you would want to work your setup magic at home with this record, then take it to a friend’s house and see if you can achieve the same results on his system. I’ve done this sort of thing for years. (Sadly, not so much anymore; nobody I know can play records like these the way we can. Playing and critically evaluating records all day, every day, year after year, you get pretty good at it. And the more you do it, the easier it gets.)
Properly set VTA is especially critical on this record, as it is on most classical recordings. The smallest change will dramatically affect the timbre, texture and harmonic information of the strings, as well as the other instruments of the orchestra.
Vinyl Condition
Mint Minus Minus is about as quiet as any vintage pressing will play, and since only the right vintage pressings have any hope of sounding good on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell. (The copies that are even a bit noisier get listed on the site are seriously reduced prices or traded back in to the local record stores we shop at.)
Those of you looking for quiet vinyl will have to settle for the sound of other pressings and Heavy Vinyl reissues, purchased elsewhere of course as we have no interest in selling records that don’t have the vintage analog magic of these wonderful recordings.
If you want to make the trade-off between bad sound and quiet surfaces with whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing might be available, well, that’s certainly your prerogative, but we can’t imagine losing what’s good about this music — the size, the energy, the presence, the clarity, the weight — just to hear it with less background noise.
A Must Own Classical Record
This Demo Disc Quality recording should be part of any serious Classical Collection. Others that belong in that category can be found here.
Side One
Suppé – Cavalerie Légère
Herold – Zampa
Adolphe Adam – If I Were King
Side Two
Suppé – Morning, Moon And Night In Vienna
Suppé – Queen Of Spades
Auber – The Crown Diamonds
Classicfm Review
The ‘Viennese Offenbach’, Franz von Suppé, surprises with a delightful disc of uplifting opera overtures.
Although the bulk Franz von Suppé’s operas and operettas have sunk into relative obscurity, his colourful overtures have survived and are still popular in concert halls the world over. Buzzing trumpets and an explosion of activity from the strings combine to create an atmosphere of lively military pomp in the overture to Leichte Kavallerie, only to be eclipsed by a heavy march, before the drums burst back in with a suitably regal fanfare.
Suppé certainly has a knack for a good tune, well suited to even the most unpolished of brass band arrangements – the characterful orchestral playing, however, brings these neglected works to life with aplomb.