More of the Music of Beethoven

• The Hot Stamper debut of Backhaus and the Vienna Phil’s masterful performance of these two sublime classical works, here with solid Double Plus (A++) grades or BETTER throughout this vintage London pressing
• It’s also remarkably quiet at the high end of Mint Minus Minus, a grade that even our most well-cared-for vintage classical titles have trouble playing at
• Piano Concerto No. 2 takes up all of this incredible Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) side one and is practically as good as we have ever heard, right up there with our Shootout Winner
• Both of these sides are big, full-bodied, clean and clear, with a wonderfully present and solid piano, and plenty of 3D space around it
• Dynamic, huge, lively, transparent and natural – with a record this good, your ability to suspend disbelief will require practically no effort at all
• After surveying various recordings of the work, it was clear to us that CS 6188 on the early London pressing offers the discerning audiophile the best performance of the piece with the highest quality sound available

This vintage London 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 Piano Concerto No. 2 / Moonlight Sonata 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.

Shootout Criteria

What are sonic qualities by which a record — any record — should be judged? Pretty much the ones we discuss in most of our Hot Stamper listings: energy, frequency extension (on both ends), transparency, spaciousness, harmonic textures (freedom from smear is key), rhythmic drive, tonal correctness, fullness, richness, three-dimensionality, and on and on down the list.

When we can get a number of these qualities to come together on the side we’re playing, we provisionally give it a ballpark Hot Stamper grade, a grade that is often revised during the shootout as we hear what the other copies are doing, both good and bad.

Once we’ve been through all the side ones, we play the best of the best against each other and arrive at a winner for that side. Other copies from earlier in the shootout will frequently have their grades raised or lowered based on how they sounded compared to the eventual shootout winner. If we’re not sure about any pressing, perhaps because we played it early on in the shootout before we had learned what to listen for, we take the time to play it again.

Repeat the process for side two and the shootout is officially over. All that’s left is to see how the sides of each pressing match up.

It may not be rocket science, but it’s a science of a kind, one with strict protocols that we’ve developed over the course of many years to insure that the results we arrive at are as accurate as we can make them.

The result of all our work speaks for itself, on this very record in fact. We guarantee you have never heard this music sound better than it does on our Hot Stamper pressing — or your money back.

What We’re Listening For On Piano Concerto No. 2 / Moonlight Sonata

• 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.
• Powerful bass — which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
• 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.

Side One

Piano Concerto No. 2 In B-Flat Major, Op. 19

Allegro Con Brio
Adagio
Rondo (Molto Allegro)

Side Two

Piano Sonata No. 14 In C-Sharp Minor, Op. 27, No. 2 “Moonlight”

Adagio Sostenuto
Allegretto
Presto Agitato

Piano Concerto No. 2

The Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat major, Op. 19, by Ludwig van Beethoven was composed primarily between 1787 and 1789, although it did not attain the form in which it was published until 1795. Beethoven did write a second finale for it in 1798 for performance in Prague, but that is not the finale that was published. It was used by the composer as a vehicle for his own performances as a young virtuoso, initially intended with the Bonn Hofkapelle.

The work is scored for solo piano, flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns and strings; it is the only one of Beethoven’s completed piano concertos that omits clarinets, trumpets and timpani. The concerto is in three movements:

• Allegro con brio
• Adagio (in E♭ major)
• Rondo Molto allegro

The first movement begins with a triumphant orchestral opening on the tonic chord, and maintains a playfulness while using chromatic passages to show off the soloist’s technique. The second movement is characteristically serene and peaceful, while the closing Rondo brings back the youth-filled playfulness heard in the opening movement.

I. Allegro con brio

This movement is in the concerto variant of sonata form (double-exposition sonata form, in which the soloist repeats the orchestra’s initial exposition of the musical material of the movement). The orchestra introduces the main theme and the subordinate theme in its exposition. The second exposition is in F major. The development wanders in key and ends on a long B-flat major scale. The recapitulation is similar to the exposition and is in B-flat major.

There is a rather difficult cadenza composed by Beethoven himself, albeit much later than the concerto itself. Stylistically, the cadenza is very different from the concerto, but it makes use of the first opening theme. Beethoven applies this melody to the cadenza in several different ways, changing its character each time and displaying the innumerable ways that a musical theme can be used and felt.

This movement was written between 1787 and 1789 in Bonn. Average performances last from thirteen to fourteen minutes.

II. Adagio

This movement is in E-flat major, the subdominant key. Like many slow movements, it has ABA (ternary) form, where the opening section introduces the themes, and the middle section develops them. This movement was written between 1787 and 1789 in Bonn. Average performances last from eight to nine minutes.

III. Rondo, Molto allegro

This movement takes the form of a rondo (ABACABA) and showcases Beethoven’s playfulness of his early period. The theme is rhythmically unbalanced by sforzandi on beats 2 and 5 of each 6/8 measure. The C section is also highly contrasting with the others, in a minor key and intensifying the syncopation of the main theme’s sforzandi.

Prior to the last appearance of the rondo theme, Beethoven brings the piano in the “wrong” key of G major, and with the theme displaced early by one beat with respect to the barline, before the orchestra “discovers” the discrepancy and returns to the correct tonic key and metric alignment. This musical joke can be seen in many of Beethoven’s subsequent compositions.

This rondo is the one that Beethoven wrote in 1795 and premiered in Vienna that year. It shows Haydn’s influence, particularly in usage of sonata rondo form. An average performance lasts from five to six minutes.

-Wikipedia