More of the music of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
Reviews and Commentaries for Recordings of the 1812 Overture
Sonic Grade: D
If you want an amazingly dynamic 1812 with huge amounts of deep bass for the firing of the cannon, you can’t do much better than this (or its UHQR brother).
But if you want rich, sweet and tonally correct brass and strings, you had best look elsewhere. I’ve never liked the sound of this record and I’m guessing if I heard a copy today I would like it even less.
Who in his right mind thinks live classical music actually sounds like this?
Telarc makes clean, modern sounding records. To these ears they sound pretty much like CDs.
If that’s your sound you can save yourself a lot of money avoiding vintage Golden Age recordings, especially the ones we sell. They’re much more expensive and rarely as quiet, but — again, to these ears — the colors and textures of real instruments seems to come to life in their grooves, and in practically no others.
We include in this modern group analog labels such as Reference, Sheffield, Chesky, Athena and the like. Having heard hundreds of amazing vintage pressings, at this stage of the game I find it hard to take any of them seriously.
Twenty years ago, maybe. But twenty years is a long time, especially in the world of audio.
We started a list of records that suffer from a lack of Tubey Magic like this one, and it can be found here.
