Hot Stamper Mercury Pressings Available Now
- An early Plum Label copy of this famous TAS list LP with STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them throughout
- 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
- This pressing boasts incredible sound from start to finish – Mercury knows how to capture the bite of the brass
- Fennell is a master of this sort of sweet and lyrical Wind Music
- Both sides of this spectacular Demo Disc recording are big, clear, rich, dynamic, transparent and energetic – here is the Mercury sound we love, and that is so hard to find
- Marks and problems 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
Harry Pearson put this record on his TAS list of Super Discs many years ago, but, like so many amazingly good recordings from the golden age, it no longer appears to qualify for inclusion.
Regardless of its current status with the writers at The Absolute Sound, a group whose taste and acumen must be considered questionable at best, the credit must go to Fennel along with the brilliant engineering team at Mercury. I’ve been told that he was a stickler for making sure everyone was perfectly in tune and playing correctly within the ensemble. That’s exactly what you hear when you play a record like this — it’s practically sonic perfection.
Fennell made a number of band music recordings for Mercury. My favorite is British Band Classics Vol. 2, which was the first Mercury recording I ever heard. I went out and bought a copy of it immediately from my local Tower Records on Golden Import.
Years later when I heard the real thing, and original pressing, I realized the Golden Import was a pretty second rate reissue, fine for the $3.99 I might have paid but a big step down from the early pressings.
Also, if you ever see a clean copy of Vol. 1, only available in Mono, pick it up. If it’s cut right it, too, is out of this world.
As I’m writing this, I can picture myself in the store. I can still remember that the clerk who helped me find the record commented that I should have come in the week before when the record was on sale for $1 off. I certainly feel like I got my money’s worth that day. This album went on to become one of my personal treasures. I used to marvel at the way the wind instruments actually sounded like the pipes of an organ. (I wasn’t really sure at first that there wasn’t an organ playing somewhere on the record. I didn’t know much about classical music then. )
