_Composers – Rimsky-Korsakov

Argenta Is the King of Espana

More of the Music of Chabrier

  • This TAS list London LP containing two of the most exciting orchestral showpieces ever composed is guaranteed to blow your mind with a KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) side two mated to a solid Double Plus (A++) side one
  • 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
  • For the longest time we thought that Ansermet’s España could not be beat, but here is a performance that can go head to head with his and might even come out on top
  • The Capriccio Espagnol is easily one of the best on record – I always thought it was the best reason to own this album, but now I see that both sides are better than most for orchestral spectacular recordings
  • This record is absolutely, positively guaranteed to shame any Heavy Vinyl pressing of orchestral music you own
  • If you’re a fan of orchestral showpieces, this London from 1957 belongs in your collection.

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The Tale of Tsar Saltan and Our Discontinued Four Plus Grade

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rimsky-Korsakov Available Now

Many years ago we played a copy with an AMAZING side one. It was so good we gave it our rare 4+ grade. We freaked out when we heard this side – it took the sound beyond anything we had ever experienced for the work.

It’s so rich and real, with huge WHOMP factor down low, as well as clear, uncolored brass and robust lower strings – wow!

We figure about one out of a hundred sides earn our Four Plus grade – you can’t get much more rare than that.

UPDATE 2026

  • Our lengthy commentary entitled outliers and out-of-this-world sound talks about how rare these kinds of pressings are and what it takes to discover them.
  • We no longer give Four Pluses out as a matter of policy, but that doesn’t mean we don’t come across records that deserve them from time to time.
  • Nowadays we most often place them under the general heading of breakthrough pressings. These are records that, out of the blue, revealed to us sound of such high quality that it changes our appreciation of the recording itself.
  • We found ourselves asking “Who knew?” Perhaps a better question might have been “How high is up?”

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Speakers Corner Has a “Winner” in Espana

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Chabrier Available Now

Sonic Grade: B

One of the better Speakers Corner Deccas.

We haven’t played a copy of this record in years, but back in the day we liked it, so let’s call it a “B” with the caveat that the older the review, the more likely we are to have changed our minds. Not sure if we would still agree with what we wrote back in the 90s when this record came out, but here it is anyway.

This is a Speakers Corner Decca 180 gram LP reissue of the famous Argenta performance, a recording which can sound positively amazing on the right original London, but only about 2 out of 10 copies actually do sound amazing.

And where in the world are you going to find 10 clean copies of a record that’s almost 40 years old?

This pressing gets you most of the way there, on reasonably quiet vinyl, for a lot less money.

UPDATE 2025

This Speakers Corner title may be good, but our Hot Stamper classical and orchestral pressings will be dramatically more transparent, open, clear and just plain REAL sounding, because these are all the areas in which Heavy Vinyl pressings tend to fall short in our experience.  For more on that subject, see here and here.

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Tchaikovsky / Rimsky-Korsakoff – Capriccio Italien / Capriccio Espagnol / Kondrashin

More of the Music of Tchaikovsky

More of the Music of Rimsky-Korsakov

  • Kondrashin and the RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra’s performance of these sublime orchestral works makes its Hot Stamper debut with solid Double Plus (A++) Living Stereo sound or BETTER throughout this vintage pressing of LSC 2323
  • Capriccio Espagnol takes up all of this Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) side two and is practically as good as we have ever heard it, right up there with our Shootout Winner
  • Our Shootout Winner was a White Dog pressing as well, with these same stamper numbers – lucky us!
  • The Shaded Dog pressings can be excellent, but the one pressing that came in last in our shootout was — drum roll, please — a Shaded Dog with a 1s side one, if you can wrap your head around it
  • Both of these sides are full, rich and clear, with more space and more three-dimensional staging than practically all of the other copies we played
  • And of course it will completely destroy any pressing you may have on Heavy Vinyl, from any label, at any playback speed
  • If you like orchestral spectaculars, this is the record for you!

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Capriccio Italien on Classic Records and How Badly I Missed the Boat

More of the Music of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky

More of the Music of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

Years ago, around 2005 if memory serves, I played a copy of the Classic Records pressing of LSC 2323 and thought it was pretty good.

I thought it was better than the Shaded Dog copies I had compared it to, which, based on hundreds of other Classic Records titles I had auditioned, was unexpected to say the least.

Little did I know that the Shaded Dog pressings on this title are not remotely competitive with the early reissues.

The best of the Shaded Dog pressings we could find, which just happened to have a 1s side one, came in tied for last with the one 70s Red Seal pressing we thought sounded good enough to make the shootout.

(Some inside baseball: most of the Shaded Dogs and Red Seals were needle-dropped, and all but two were eliminated before the shootout. It takes time and wastes money to clean and play pressings that sound hopeless, so a quick elimination round often precedes the cleaning process.)

Back then it was tough to wrap my head around the idea that a Classic Record classical title could actually be better sounding than a Shaded Dog — it had never happened, so I knew there had to be more to the story.

Finding the time to do the serious investigation of LSC 2323 that would be necessary to get to the bottom of it was not in the cards, so I shelved the project for close to the next twenty years.

The title would have to wait until 2024 to go through a proper shooout, and when it did, naturally the Classic was part of the mix, which is the way we do things here at Better Records. Every record gets the chance to show us what it can do, to be evaluated fairly without the listener having any way to know which pressing is playing.

It turns out that side one of the Classic was passable, but side two — the side I had probably never played — was every bit as bad as most of their other classical offerings.

Side One, Second Movement (Tchaikovsky)

  • Big, but bright and compressed
  • Gets loud but opaque and hot
  • Good weight

Side One, First Movement

  • Bright and blurry bells
  • Sort of tubey but a mess
  • Grade: 1+ (passable, but no Hot Stamper)

Side Two (Rimsky-Korsakov)

  • Big but boomy and smeary
  • Brass is edgy and opaque
  • No top end or space
  • Peaks are hot and congested
  • Grade: NFG

To recap: In 2005 I was impressed with Classic’s pressing of LSC 2323. That was only twenty years ago, yet I could not have been more wrong. I thought my stereo was great — I’d owned top quality equipment since 1975 by then — thirty sodding years — so my audiophile credentials would surely dwarf those of the vast majority of forum posters who write about audiophile pressings today. How reliable should we expect their reviews to be?

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Music of Old Russia – We Give Up (on Noisy Angel Vinyl)

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin Available Now

White Hot Stamper sound on side one – the Tubey Magic is off the scale. Milstein is brilliant on these shorter violin works, 7 in all.

This rare, hard to find original Blue Angel stereo pressing has exquisite sound. As we noted in our listing for Milstein’s Saint-Saens Third, it is the rare Heifetz album on Shaded Dog (or any other label) that could hope to compete with it.

We would rank this Angel pressing with the best of Rabin and Milstein on Capitol, as well as the wonderful Ricci and Campoli discs on London/Decca.

The transparency of both sides lets you “see” the orchestra clearly, without sacrificing richness or weight.

What a record! What a performance from the incomparable Nathan Milstein. 

UPDATE 2024

This is an album we can no longer find enough clean, early stereo pressings with which to do a proper shootout.

Consequently it has been tagged as a never again record. It’s possible we could do it again, but unlikely.

We love both the music and sound and encourage you to find a nice copy for yourself.

For best results, stick to the Blue Label stereo pressings. There are two, but only one of them sounds good.

See how hard all this record stuff is!

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A Scheherazade that Lacks Power in the Brass and Richness in the Lower Strings? No Thanks

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rimsky-Korsakov Available Now

One of the most dynamic Scheherazade‘s on record. The brass really blasts through in this recording. 

Of course the question is how does this recording stack up to the famous Reiner. Well, I’ll tell you.

The Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra is not in the same league with the CSO, that’s well known. Dorati may be every bit as talented as Reiner, but he doesn’t have the players at his disposal capable of pulling off demanding material such as this.

But the orchestra acquits itself well here. The first violinist is quite good. That’s not the problem.

What lets the side down is the Mercury recording team, who fail to adequately present the weight of the orchestra in the lower midrange and below. One thing I noticed recently when playing an original LSC 2446 was how rich and powerful the sound was in the lower strings and in the brass relative to later pressings of the same title and other recordings of the work.

That opening movement of Scheherazade needs power down there and the Mercury simply doesn’t have enough of that power to qualify it as one of the top sounding Mercs.

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Rimsky-Korsakov / Scheherazade (Early Reissue)

More of the Music of Rimsky-Korsakov

rimskscheh_6212_1610_1389793105

  • Very good sound throughout this vintage London pressing of Ansermet and the Suisse Romande’s superb performance of this dazzlingly symphonic suite, with both sides earning Hot Stamper grades
  • It’s richer, fuller and with more presence than the average copy, and that’s especially true for whatever godawful Heavy Vinyl pressing is currently being foisted on an unsuspecting record buying public
  • This is true of even our lowest-priced, lowest-graded copies – they are guaranteed to sound much better than any pressing you can find on the market today, as well as any pressing you may already own
  • This copy is in fact one of those lowest graded copies – as you can see from the shootout notes below, it’s a bit small and veiled, and maybe dry in places
  • Even with these common shortcomings, we doubt there is any modern pressing that can touch it, and even the best vintage pressings of other recordings of the work will more than likely come up short when played head to head with this very LP
  • We’ve come up with a simple listening test to help our audiophile brethren judge pressings of Scheherazade, especially those woeful iterations of the music on Heavy Vinyl. We hope you will find time to avail yourself of the lessons we’ve learned

We did a monster shootout for this music in 2014, one we had been planning for more than two years. On hand were quite a few copies of the Reiner on RCA; the Ansermet on London (CS 6212, his second stereo recording, from 1961, not the earlier and noticeably poorer sounding recording from in 1959); the Ormandy on Columbia, and a few others we felt had potential.

The only recordings that held up all the way through — the fourth movement being THE Ball Breaker of all time, for both the engineers and musicians — were those by Reiner and Ansermet. This was disappointing considering how much time and money we spent finding, cleaning and playing those ten or so other pressings.

Here it is many years later and we’re capitalizing on what we learned from the first big go around, which is simply this: the Ansermet recording on Decca/London can not only hold its own with the Reiner on RCA, but beat it in virtually every area. The presentation and the sound itself are both more relaxed and natural, even when compared to the best RCA pressings.

The emotional content of the first three movements (all of side one) under Ansermet’s direction are clearly superior. The roller-coaster excitement Reiner and the CSO bring to the fourth movement cannot be faulted, or equaled. In every other way, Ansermet’s performance is the one for me. We did a monster shootout for this music in 2014, one we had been planning for more than two years. On hand were quite a few copies of the Reiner on RCA; the Ansermet on London (CS 6212, his second stereo recording, from 1961, not the earlier and noticeably poorer sounding recording from in 1959); the Ormandy on Columbia, and a few others we felt had potential. (more…)

Rimsky-Korsakov / Scheherazade / Ansermet (Decca)

More of the Music of Rimsky-Korsakov

  • Excellent sound throughout this vintage Decca pressing of Ansermet and the Suisse Romande’s superb performance of this dazzlingly symphonic suite, with both sides earning solid Double Plus (A++) grades or BETTER
  • 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
  • This copy will go head to head with the hottest Reiner pressing and is guaranteed to blow the doors off of it or your money back
  • The top end is natural and sweet – this is the way the solo violin in the left channel is supposed to sound
  • Extraordinary Demo Disc sound – the brass has weight and energy on that powerful first movement like nothing you’ve ever heard in your life )outside of a live performance)
  • This is the first full price Decca pressing we have ever offered with Hot Stampers — most Decca pressings of this title are awful sounding and it took us a long time to figure out how to find the good ones
  • Marks in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these early pressings – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you

We did a monster shootout for this music way back in 2014, one we had been planning for more than two years. On hand were quite a few copies of the Reiner on RCA; the Ansermet on London (CS 6212, his second stereo recording, from 1961, not the earlier and noticeably poorer sounding recording from in 1959); the Ormandy on Columbia, and a few others we felt had potential.

The only recordings that held up all the way through — the fourth movement being the Ball Breaker of all time, for both the engineers and musicians — were those by Reiner and Ansermet. This was disappointing considering how much time and money we spent finding, cleaning and playing those ten or so other pressings.

Here it is over a decade later and we’re capitalizing on what we learned from the first big go around, which is simply this: the Ansermet recording on Decca/London can not only hold its own with the Reiner on RCA, but beat it in virtually every area. The presentation and the sound itself are both more relaxed and natural, even when compared to the best RCA pressings.

The emotional content of the first three movements (all of side one) under Ansermet’s direction are clearly superior. The roller coaster excitement Reiner and the CSO bring to the fourth movement cannot be faulted, or equaled. In every other way, Ansermet’s performance is the one for me.

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Has This Person Ever Heard a Good Sounding Scheherazade?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now

May I refer you to the review Jonathin Valin wrote in 2013 for the Analogue Productions Scheherazade. (Emphasis added.)

LSC 2446 Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherazade. Grade: A+.

Another one of HP’s favorites, this LP (at least in its earliest pressings) is famously wonderful sounding, and the Analogue Productions version certainly lives up to the hype.

Once again string tone—and this disc is celebrated for its string tone—is ravishingly beautiful. The bass is astonishing, deep and authoritative. And dynamics are tremendous.

We Beg to Differ

The bass is not authoratative, it is overblown and annoying.

The dynamics are not tremendous, they are, in fact, lacking.

The string tone is at best passable – ravishingly beautiful is hopelessly off the mark.

A properly-mastered, properly-pressed vintage RCA should sound more or less like this one.

Worlds better in every way.

If I were in charge of the TAS Super Disc list, obviously I would not have put this record on it.

It’s not a Super Disc. It’s not even a Very Good disc.

To be honest, it’s actually a pretty Bad Disc. The TAS List is full of them these days.

Granted, it always had some bad records on it, but now it has a great many, with more being added every year, most of them pressed on Heavy Vinyl.

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