The string tone here is especially rich and sweet, yet full of texture and that lovely rosiny quality that vintage pressings capture so well. (Sometimes capture so well. We’ve played plenty of copies with a smeary quality that robs the strings of their lovely sheen.)
The piano is beautifully recorded as well. Geza Anda’s performance is hard to fault here. You will have a very hard time finding better recordings of these Mozart piano concertos, of that we have no doubt. (more…)
More of the Music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Neither the sound nor the performance of this 1958 Mercury are impressive.
1959 just happens to be one of the all time great years for recording in analog.
If you have any doubt, check out this amazing group of albums, all recorded or released that year.
This Mercury might be passable on an old school system, but it was too unpleasant to be played on the high quality modern equipment we use.
There are quite a number of others that we’ve run into over the years with similar shortcomings. Here they are, broken down by label.
Have You Noticed…
If you’re a fan of Mercury Living Presence records — and what right-thinking audiophile wouldn’t be? — have you noticed that many of them, this one for example, don’t sound very good?
If you’re an audiophile with good equipment, you should have.
But did you? Or did you buy into the hype surrounding these rare pressings and just ignore the problems with the sound?
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Mozart Available Now
On most copies the strings are slightly drier and more harsh and steely than one would want, occasionally turning strident in the louder passages.
As always, proper VTA adjustment — by ear — is critical to getting the strings to sound their best.
More advice on setting your VTA.
An extended top end helps the harmonics of the stringed instruments immensely.
Here are some other records that are good for testing string tone and texture.
The more resolving copies will show you more of the hall, which greatly adds to the sense that you are listening to live music, not a record.
What to Listen For
On most copies the strings are slightly drier and more steely than one would want, occasionally turning strident in the louder passages. As always, proper VTA adjustment — by ear — is critical to getting the strings to sound their best.
An extended top end helps the harmonics of the stringed instruments immensely.
The more resolving copies will show you more of the hall which adds to the sense that you are listening to live music, not a record.
Is It Live?
Hot Stamper Pressings of Vintage Columbia Albums Available Now
An undiscovered gem from 1967 on the 360 Columbia label.
Side two of this record blew our minds with its White Hot Stamper sound.
Musically and sonically this record is nothing short of wonderful.
Who knew? You could play fifty vintage piano recordings and not find one as good as this.
Tchaikovsky, Liszt, Beethoven, Debussy, Mozart — these shorter pieces and excerpts were composed by those with the greatest gift for melody, men who’ve produced works that have stood the test of time, enchanting audiences over the centuries with works of such beauty and charm.
Here at Better Records we have never been fans of Columbia classical LPs. Years ago we noted that:
Columbia classical recordings have a tendency to be shrill, upper-midrangy, glary and hard sounding. The upper mids are often nasally and pinched; the strings and brass will screech and blare at you in the worst way. If Columbia’s goal was to drive the audiophile classical music lover screaming from the room (or, more realistically, induce a strong desire to call it a day record-playing wise), most of the time one would have to grant they’ve succeeded brilliantly. Occasionally they fail. When they do we call those pressings Hot Stampers.
To be clear, the fault more often than not has to be in the mastering, not the recording. We’ve raved about so many great copies of titles in the past, only to find that the next three or four LPs we pick up of the very same titles sound just godawful. There are some amazing Bernstein recordings out there, but the the amount of work it takes to find the one that sounds good is overwhelming — how can such great recordings be regularly mastered so poorly?
Side One
A++, with a huge, rich, sweet, natural sounding piano. The more you listen, the more apparent it becomes that, as natural as it may seem at first blush, there are still some old school tubey colorations that make the sound not quite as lifelike and real as one might wish.
And the confirmation of that finding comes as soon as you flip the record over.
Years ago we wrote:
This is a very old review, probably from the early 2010s, so take it for what it’s worth. I suspect we could find a much better sounding copy of the album today than we could back then, before we had the cleaning systems and playback equipment we do now.
All that turned out to be true.
In 2024 we did another shootout for the album, our first in more than ten years! I am happy to say the sound was a knockout on the best copies, some of the finest violin concerto sound we have ever heard.
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 happy to help you do that.)
Our comments from 2010:
Hot Stamper Pressings with Jascha Heifetz Performing