Hot Stamper Pressings of the music of Edvard Grieg Available Now
Below are the notes for a later pressing we played many years ago. I doubt if we would like this Red Seal pressing much now. The later RCA pressings we’ve played lately left much to be desired.
I get the feeling it lacks Tubey Magic, as well as weight in the lower registers, and we are much less tolerant of those two shortcomings now than we were then.
Our review from 2008
Fiedler is wonderful here, which is to be expected. What’s unusual about this Red Seal is how good the sound is. It’s extremely transparent and tonally correct.
It sounds to me like a flat transfer.
Some tubey colorations would be nice, especially in the louder passages.
The sound also lacks a bit of weight in the bottom end.
But these faults are mostly made up for by the tremendous clarity and freedom from distortion that this pressing has. I doubt if the Shaded Dog has those qualities.
Notes added in 2024
Our favorite recording of Peer Gynt is the one by Otto Gruner-hegge and the Oslo Philharmonic from 1959.
The only other reading of the work with top quality sonics is the one with Fjeldstad and the London Symphony Orchestra, especially if you can find it on the right Ace of Diamonds pressing.
Live and learn is our motto, and progress in audio is a feature, not a bug, of record collecting at the most advanced levels.
(“Advanced” is a code word for having little to no interest in any remastered pressing marketed to the audiophile community. If you want to avoid the worst of them, we are uniquely qualified to help you do that.)
Further Reading