More of the Music of Franz Schubert
- This rare and highly sought after Shaded Dog pressing finally returns to the site, here with solid Double Plus (A++) Living Stereo sound or BETTER from start to finish
- It’s also fairly quiet at Mint Minus Minus, a grade that even our most well-cared-for vintage classical titles have trouble playing at
- Side two was sonically very close to our Shootout Winner – you will be amazed at how big and rich and tubey the sound is
- Our shootout winner in this case, like many of the rare Living Stereo titles we do offer, looked fine but played with too much surface noise to be enjoyable on highly resolving equipment
- Both of these sides are remarkably transparent, with real “rosin on the bow” resolution and naturalness that is lacking on many of the RCA chamber recordings we’ve played in the past
- Lewis Layton engineered this TAS-approved recording and he nailed it, perfectly capturing the rich, textured sheen on the strings, the hallmark of Living Stereo sound in the 50s and 60s
- 1960 was a great year for classical recordings – other Must Own orchestral releases can be found here
This vintage Living Stereo pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to “see” the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It’s what vintage all analog recordings are known for — this sound.
If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it — not often, and certainly not always — but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.
What The Best Sides Of Death the Maiden 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 1960
- 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.
Copies with rich lower mids and nice extension up top did the best in our shootout, assuming they weren’t veiled or smeary of course. So many things can go wrong on a record! We know, we’ve heard them all.
Top end extension is critical to the sound of the best copies. Lots of old records (and new ones) have no real top end; consequently, the studio or stage will be missing much of its natural air and space, and instruments will lack their full complement of harmonic information.
Tube smear is common to most vintage pressings. The copies that tend to do the best in a shootout will have the least (or none), yet are full-bodied, tubey and rich.
Size and Space
One of the qualities that we don’t talk about on the site nearly enough is the SIZE of the record’s presentation. Some copies of the album just sound small — they don’t extend all the way to the outside edges of the speakers, and they don’t seem to take up all the space from the floor to the ceiling. In addition, the sound can often be recessed, with a lack of presence and immediacy in the center.
Other copies — my notes for these copies often read “BIG and BOLD” — create a huge soundfield, with the music positively jumping out of the speakers. They’re not brighter, they’re not more aggressive, they’re not hyped-up in any way, they’re just bigger and clearer.
And most of the time those very special pressings are just plain more involving. When you hear a copy that does all that — a copy like this one — it’s an entirely different listening experience.
What We’re Listening For On Death the Maiden
- 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.
TAS List
Harry Pearson put this record on his TAS list of super discs, and with good reason: it’s wonderful! It’s also one of the rarest and hardest to find recordings in the entire Living Stereo catalog.
Being on the TAS list doesn’t guarantee great sound, but Better Records does. If you don’t think a record sounds as good as we’ve described, we’ll always happily take it back and refund your money. Good luck getting ol’ Harry to send you a check when the TAS-approved pressings you pick up don’t deliver.
And now that the list is full of awful Classic Records pressings one has to wonder why anyone would put much stock in it.
Side One
Death and the Maiden
- First Movement: Allegro
- Second Movement: Andante Con Moto
Side Two
- Third Movement: Scherzo: Allegro Molto
- Fourth Movement: Presto
Quartettsatz
- Allegro Assai
Death and the Maiden / String Quartet No. 14 (Schubert)
The String Quartet No. 14 in D minor, D 810, known as Death and the Maiden, is a piece by Franz Schubert that has been called “one of the pillars of the chamber music repertoire.” It was composed in 1824, after the composer suffered from a serious illness and realized that he was dying. It is named for the theme of the second movement, which Schubert took from a song he wrote in 1817 of the same title. But, writes Walter Willson Cobbett, all four movements of the quartet are welded “into a unity under the pressure of a dominating idea – the dance of death.”
The quartet was first played in 1826 in a private home, and was not published until 1831, three years after Schubert’s death.
Analysis
The quartet throughout is characterized by sudden dramatic shifts from fortissimo to pianissimo, from the lyrical to the compelling and dramatic. A driving undercurrent of triplets is a recurring motif in all four movements.
First movement: Allegro
In the 14-measure introduction, Schubert establishes the elements that will carry through the entire movement. The quartet begins with a unison D, played fortissimo, and a triplet figure, that establishes the triplet motif. Three and a half measures of fortissimo break off into a sudden, pianissimo chorale, the first of the many violent shifts of mood that occur throughout.
Second movement: Andante con moto
The second movement is a theme and five variations, based on the theme from the Schubert Lied. The theme is like a death march in G minor, ending on a G major chord. Throughout the movement, Schubert does not deviate from the basic harmonic and sentence structure of the 24-measure theme. But each variation expresses a profoundly different emotion.
Third movement: Scherzo – Allegro molto
Walter Willson Cobbett describes the third movement as the “dance of the demon fiddler.”There is indeed something demonic in this fast-paced scherzo, full of syncopations and, like the other movements, dramatic leaps from fortissimo to pianissimo.
The scherzo is designed as a classical minuet: two strains in 3/4 time, repeated, in D minor, followed by a contrasting trio section in D major, at a slower tempo, and ending with a recapitulation of the opening strains. The trio section is the only real respite from the compelling pace of the whole quartet: a typically Schubertesque melody, with the first violin playing a dancing descant above the melody line in the lower voices, then the viola takes the melody as the first violin plays high eighth notes.
Fourth movement: Presto
The finale of the quartet is a tarantella in rondo-sonata form, in D minor. The tarantella is a breakneck Italian dance in 6/8 time, that, according to tradition, was a treatment for madness and convulsions brought on by the bite of a tarantula spider. Appropriately, Cobbett calls this movement “a dance of death.”
-Wikipedia
Further Reading