_Composers – Tchaikovsky

Tchaikovsky / The Nutcracker Ballet in Two Acts (Complete) / Ansermet

More of the music of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

More Orchestral Music Conducted by Ernest Ansermet

  • Tchaikovsky’s complete Classical Masterpiece returns to the site for the first time in nearly two-years with INSANELY GOOD Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound on all FOUR sides of these original London pressings
  • 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
  • If you have never experienced a vintage top quality pressing of a Wilkinson-engineered Decca Tree recording from Victoria Hall, this is your chance to hear sound that puts practically anything else to shame
  • A record like this lets you get lost in the world of its music, and what could be more important in a recording than that?
  • This is our favorite performance of The Nutcracker, perhaps the most famous ballet ever written, and one that belongs in every right-thinking audiophile’s collection
  • Enchanting music and sound combine on this copy to make one seriously good Demo Disc, if what you are trying to demonstrate is how relaxed and involved vintage analog can make you feel
  • If you’re a fan of brilliant orchestral showpieces, this London Box Set from 1959 belongs in your collection.

There is certainly no shortage of Audio Spectaculars available on the site. A record such as this, so rich, natural and effortless, has distinctly different qualities that we feel are every bit as vital to the critical audiophile’s enjoyment of Tchaikovsky’s music.

Ansermet breathes life into this ballet as only he can and the Decca engineering team led by Kenneth Wilkinson do him proud. (more…)

Tchaikovsky / 1812 Overture / Marche Slave / Alwyn

More of the music of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

More Orchestral Spectaculars

  • Outstanding sound from start to finish – this Decca recording of the 1812 from 1958 is the only one we know of that can show you the power of Live Music for this important work
  • This UK pressing is BIG, lively, clear, open and resolving of musical information like no copy of the 1812 you’ve heard
  • The two coupling pieces, Marche Slave and the Capriccio Italien, also have rich, powerful, weighty brass and lower strings
  • The most exciting and beautifully played 1812 we know of – we encourage you to compare this to the best orchestral recording in your collection and let the chips fall where they may
  •  When you hear how good this record sounds, you may have a hard time believing that it’s a budget reissue from 1970, but that’s precisely what it is. Even more extraordinary, the right copies are the ones that win shootouts
  • There are about 150 orchestral recordings we’ve awarded the honor of offering the Best Performances with the Highest Quality Sound, and this recording certainly deserve a place on that list.

There is some noticeable low frequency rumble under the quietest passages of the music for those of you with the big woofers to hear it!

The lower strings are rich and surrounded by lovely hall space. This is not a sound one hears on record often enough and it is glorious when a pressing as good as this one can help make that sound clear to you.

The string sections from top to bottom are shockingly rich and sweet — this pressing is yet another wonderful example of what the much-lauded Decca recording engineers (Kenneth Wilkinson in this case) were able to capture on analog tape all those years ago.

The 1958 master has been transferred brilliantly using “modern” cutting equipment (from 1970, not the low-rez junk they’re forced to make do with these days), giving you, the listener, sound that only the best of both worlds can offer.

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Tchaikovsky / Paganini – Violin Concertos / Campoli

More of the music of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

More of the music of Niccolo Paganini (1782-1840)

  • A vintage Decca pressing of these superb concertos with stunning Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) sound on both sides, just shy of our Shootout Winner – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • This copy (only the second to hit the site in two years) showed us the balance of clarity and sweetness we were looking for in the violin – not many recordings from this era can do that
  • Campoli brings his warmth, feeling, and technical precision to these classical masterpieces
  • Some old record collectors (like me) say classical recording quality ain’t what it used to be – here’s the proof
  • Our favorite performance of the Tchaikovsky is still the RCA with Heifetz, but the best copies of this record are not far behind
  • With the wonderful Paganini-Kreisler piece on side two, this record comes very highly recommended

The second work on side two, Kreisler’s reworking of the first movement of the Paganini Concerto No. 1, is hard to fault. Pull up some youtube videos to see just how amazing and exciting it is.

A true Demo Disc Violin Recording.

And better than the original London pressing we had of the recording – the reissue is actually tubier, with none of the dryness you sometimes hear on London discs, and very dynamic.

(We know a thing or two about Decca recordings with dry strings. We took a deep dive into into the subject here.)

Higher-rez and more present too. (more…)

Tchaikovsky – Classic Records and the TAS List

More of the music of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

Reviews and Commentaries for the 1812 Overture

This is a classic case of Live and Learn.

We used to like the Classic Records pressing of LSC 2241 a lot more than we do now. Our system was noticeably darker and apparently far less revealing when we last auditioned the Classic back in the 90s, and those two qualities did most of the heavy lifting needed to disguise its shortcomings. We mistakenly noted:

HP put the Shaded Dog pressing (the only way it comes; there is no RCA reissue to my knowledge) on his TAS List of Super Discs, and with good reason: it’s wonderful!

The rest of our commentary still holds up though:

But for some reason he also put the Classic Records Heavy Vinyl reissue on the list, and that record’s not even passable, let alone wonderful. It’s far too lean and modern sounding, and no original Living Stereo record would ever sound that way, thank goodness. 

If they did few audiophiles would still be paying the top dollar collector prices that the Shaded Dog commands to this day.

Updated Thoughts on the Classic Records Heavy Vinyl Reissue

The Classic on Heavy Vinyl (LSC 2241) is lean and modern sounding. No early Living Stereo pressing sounds like it in our experience, and we can only thank goodness for that. If originals and early reissues did sound more like the Classic pressings, my guess is that few would collect them and practically no one would put much sonic stock in them.

Apparently most audiophiles (including audiophile record reviewers) have never heard a classical recording of the quality of a good original pressing (or good ’60s or ’70s reissue). If they had Classic Records would have gone out of business immediately after producing their first three Living Stereo titles, all of which were dreadful and recognized and identified as such by us way back in 1994.

Here are some Hot Stamper pressings of TAS List titles that actually have audiophile sound quality, guaranteed. And if for some reason you disagree with us about how good they sound, we will be happy to give you your money back.

Here are some others that we do not think qualify as Super Discs.

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Tchaikovsky / Swan Lake – Notes for All Four Sides

More of the Music of Tchaikovsky

Reviews and Commentaries for the music of Tchaikovsky

This review was written for our first shootout of the complete ballet in 2012.

This London Small Red Label “Whiteback” (it’s white inside the box, not on the back, but you get what I mean) UK Import 2 LP Set put every other recording we had of Swan Lake to shame. This is the one folks, assuming you want a nearly complete performance of the work. (We will have some single LP highlight pressings coming to the site down the road. The Fistoulari on London can be especially good on the right pressing.) 

The performance here by Ansermet and the Suisse Romande I rank second to none.

Ansermet is surely the man for this music, and the famously huge hall he recorded in just as surely contributes much to the wonderful sound here. (The Royal Gala Ballet is a good example. If you have the two grand to spend we highly recommend you find yourself a good one. And don’t waste your money on the Classic no matter what you may have read elsewhere.)

Speaking of bad sounding Heavy Vinyl, Speakers Corner reissued this very recording on 180g fifteen years ago or so and ruined it. Imagine that. (I happily admit their Nutcracker was quite good for a Heavy Vinyl reissue. It cannot hold a candle to a good vintage pressing but it will beat most of what’s out there on audiophile vinyl, which, truth be told, isn’t saying much.)

This Masterpiece of Ballet Music should have a place in any audiophile’s Classical Collection. Others that belong in that category can be found here.

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Tchaikovsky / Excerpts from The Nutcracker

Reviews and Commentaries for The Nutcracker

More of the music of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

[This review is from many years ago. I cannot say we would still feel the same way about the reissue reviewed here.]

For our shootout we played Ansermet’s performance of the Suites on London, as well as pressings by Reiner and Fiedler, both of whom opted against using the Suites as Tchaikovsky wrote them, preferring instead to create a shorter version of the complete ballet with excerpts of their own choosing (shown below).

The CSO, as one might expect, plays this work with more precision and control than any other. They also bring more excitement and dynamic contrasts to their performance, adding greatly to our enjoyment of the music.

Side One

A++, Super Hot! The quieter passages have some of the richest, sweetest, most Tubey Magical sound you will ever hear in your home. There is not a trace of phony sound anywhere to be found, and the most pronounced effect it has on the listener is to make him relax and forget entirely about the sound. With this record the music is all.

The hall is huge with space around all the instruments.

Listen to how breathy the flutes are. This of course is a result of the judicious use of compression. The loudest string passages can get congested, another result of the use of compression (unavoidable in classical recordings), so we are holding the grade at A++.

Side Two

A++ to A+++, and some of the best sound we heard all day in our shootout! Every bit as rich and full-bodied as side one, but with less compression this side is more dynamic and exciting than any other that we played. A little dark, but that prevents the strings from becoming strident when loud.

The clarinet is especially musical on this recording. What a record!

Reissues Vs Originals

This RCA reissue pressing of LSC 2328 has some of the BEST SOUND we have ever heard for The Nutcracker, and we’ve played them by the dozens, on the greatest Golden Age labels of all time, including, but not limited to, the likes of Mercury, RCA and London.

In a somewhat (but not too) surprising turn of events, the reissue pressing we are offering here beat all the originals and early reissues we could throw at it. Finally, this legendary Mohr/Layton production can be heard in its full glory!

If you like your Nutcracker exciting and dynamic, this is the copy for you.

Don’t buy into that record collecting / audiophile canard that the originals are better.

We like our recordings to have as many Live Music qualities as possible, and those qualities really come through on a record such as this when reproduced on the full-range speaker system we use.

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Tchaikovsky / Nutcracker Suites 1 & 2 / Ansermet

More of the music of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840 – 1893)

Hot Stamper Pressings of The Nutcracker Available Now

  • A superb copy of Tchaikovsky’s Classical Masterpiece with Double Plus (A++) sound from first note to last
  • 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
  • If you have never experienced a vintage top quality pressing of a Wallace-engineered Decca Tree recording from Victoria Hall, this is your chance to hear sound that puts practically everything else to shame
  • A record like this lets you get lost in the world of its music, and what could be more important in a recording than that?
  • This is an AMAZINGLY well recorded performance of one of the most famous ballets – probably the most famous – ever committed to analog tape
  • Enchanting music and sound combine on this copy to make one seriously good Demo Disc, if what you are trying to demonstrate is how relaxed and involved vintage analog can make you feel
  • 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

There is certainly no shortage of Audio Spectaculars available on the site. A record such as this, so rich, natural and effortless, has distinctly different qualities that we feel are every bit as vital to the serious audiophile’s enjoyment of Tchaikovsky’s music.

Ansermet breathes life into this ballet as only he can and the Decca engineering team led by Roy Wallace do him proud.

(more…)

Letter of the Week – “There is an airiness to the recording where the instruments seem to float in a 3D space in the soundstage.”

More of the music of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

More Orchestral Music Conducted by Ernest Ansermet

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently. 

Hey Tom, 

I wanted to give you my impressions of the hot stamper (vs. the Speakers Corner Decca reissue) before going out of town for a bit.

Crank it up. Sounds really good turned up loud so I knew I was going to be in for a treat. There is an airiness to the recording where the instruments seem to float in a 3D space in the soundstage. I also noticed an improved clarity of the instruments themselves; in particular, the triangles, flute, and strings.

Yes, these differences are obvious to us, because we already have the best pressings, so the heavy vinyl stuff is always wrong or worse in some way that is not hard to hear. Back to back it does not take a pair of golden ears to hear these kinds of differences.

Funny, we discussed this yesterday and as you said, until you compare multiple pressings you might think you already have a great recording. Another big difference I noticed was the tightness and solidity of the bottom end. The Decca [Heavy Vinyl reissue] seemed to smear the low frequency content compared to the London.

This happens a lot. The smear is everywhere on these newly remastered records but sometimes you can hear it most clearly in one area or another. In this case you heard it most clearly in the bass, but it’s everywhere.

The ONLY thing I miss is the flow of the full ballet. The ballet seems to tell a nice complete story where the suite just gives me the reader’s digest version — sort of a greatest hits if you will, and does not allow one to immerse themselves in the whole experience. Ideally, a hot stamper of the full ballet would be pretty amazing I am guessing.

We can definitely get you the complete ballet at some point, but these shootouts take years to get going.

I would say your best bet is to return the record since it doesn’t seem to be the way you want to hear the music and we can put you on the want list for the next complete version we find.

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Tchaikovsky / Serenade for Strings – Munch

The Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now

More Classical and Orchestral Recordings

  • Outstanding Living Stereo sound for Munch’s recording with the Boston Symphony, with both sides of this original Shaded Dog pressing earning Double Plus (A++) grades or BETTER
  • The 14 minute long Elgar piece on this Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) side two is close to the BEST we have ever heard, right up there with our Shootout Winner
  • Surely one of the greatest performances ever recorded, more powerful and emotional than any with which we are familiar
  • “In his conception of the Serenade, Tchaikovsky envisioned a work which falls somewhere between a symphony and a string quintet. The work is as personal as any of the composer’s symphonies and as intimate as his chamber music.”

The texture and harmonic overtones of the strings are near perfection. As we listened we became completely immersed in the music on the record, transfixed by the remarkable virtuosity the performers brought to the work in 1958, as well as the quality of RCA’s engineering.

The overall sound is rich, sweet and Tubey Magical. For those of you who have only the Cisco pressing, you are in for a world of better sound. After playing these sides, you may be inclined to take all your heavy vinyl classical LPs and put them up on ebay, or at the very least, in storage. None of them, I repeat not a single one, will ever sound the way this record does.

Quality record production is a lost art, and it’s been lost for a very long time.

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Compromised Recordings and the Rapture of the Purely Musical Experience

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Pressings Available Now

Core Collection Classical Albums with Hot Stampers Available Now

The best classical recordings of the ’50s and ’60s, like the wonderful Mercury you see pictured, were compromised in every imaginable way.

Yet somehow they manage to stand head and shoulders above virtually anything that has come after them. How is that possible?

Well, having taken advantage of scores of Revolutionary Changes in Audio that have come to pass since those days, finally we can hear them in all their glory on the kind of high quality playback equipment that exists today.

The music lives and breathes on those old LPs. Playing them you find yourself in the Living Presence of the musicians. You become lost in the performances captured in the grooves of these old records.

Whatever the limitations of the medium, they seem to fade quickly from consciousness. What remains is the rapture of the musical experience.

That’s what happens when a good record meets a good turntable.

We live for records like these. It’s the reason we all get up in the morning and come to work, to find and play good records. It’s what this site is all about — offering the audiophile music lover recordings that provide real musical satisfaction. It’s hard work — so hard that nobody else seems to want to do it — but the payoff makes it all worthwhile. To us anyway. Hope you feel the same.

The One Out of Ten Rule

If you have too many classical records taking up too much space and need to winnow them down to a more manageable size, pick a composer and play half a dozen of his works. Most classical records display an irredeemable mediocrity right from the start; it doesn’t take a pair of golden ears to hear it.

If you’re after the best sound, it’s the rare record that will have it, which makes clearing shelf space a lot easier than you might think. If you keep more than one out of ten you’re probably setting the bar too low if our experience is any guide.

Plenty of Vintage Pressings Don’t Make the Grade

Bad sounding vintage classical pressings on collectible labels are more common than you might think. We should know, we’ve played them by the hundreds. To do listings for them all would be a full time job. Here is just a small sample of some of the ones we’ve auditioned, broken down by label.

  • London/Decca records with weak sound or performances
  • Mercury records with weak sound or performances
  • RCA records with weak sound or performances

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