More of the music of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
We’ve been playing quite a number of different pressings of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 lately, hoping to find a 5th that would really knock us out.
Most have left us unimpressed with the quality of the sound, and in the case of this Solti on London, the performance.
London CS 6117. Solti conducts the Paris Conservatory Orchestra.
The sound is OK. It’s fairly tubey and there’s a decent amount of energy to the recording.
The problem is not the sound, the problem is that the performance is terrible. Our main listening guy said he could hardly recognize the music!
DG SLPM 138 658. Mravinsky conducting the Leningrad Phil on an early pressing from 1961.
Big energy and a great performance but the string tone is shrill and smeary.
We are very used to hearing this kind of sound on Deutsche Grammophon records. This is why you see so few of that label’s pressings on our site.
How Did We Figure All of This Out?
There are more than 2000 Hot Stamper reviews on this blog. Do you know how we learned so much about so many records?
Simple. We ran thousands and thousands of record experiments under carefully controlled conditions, and we continue to run scores of them week in and week out to this very day.