More of the music of Manuel De Falla (1876-1946)
More Classical and Orchestral Recordings
- This vintage London Stereo Treasury Import LP of Falla’s wonderful classical works boasts superb Double Plus (A++) grades or close to them from first note to last
- Side two is big, rich, open, and natural sounding with wonderfully full vocals and a more three-dimensional sound than most other copies we played, and side one is not far behind in all those areas
- The Argenta recording of El Retablo de Maese Pedro (Master Peter’s Puppet Show) is High Fidelity Audiophile Demo Disc Quality Gold, with bells, drums, voices, trumpets, strings, woodwinds and more, all sounding so real it will take your breath away.
- Our favorite performance with top quality sound is found on a 1967 Decca with Fruhbeck De Burgos at the helm, but the Ansermet we are presenting here is still a very good record if you know what to look for
This Golden Age tape has been mastered brilliantly with “modern” mastering equipment from 1967, 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.
You can be pretty sure of two things when you hear a record of this quality: one, the original won’t sound as good, having been cut on much cruder equipment.
And two, no modern recutting of the tapes by the likes of Speakers Corner for example could begin to capture this kind of naturalistic sound. I have never heard a Heavy Vinyl pressing begin to do what this record is doing. This STS may be a London budget reissue pressing, but it was mastered by Decca, pressed in England on high quality vinyl, using fairly fresh tapes, and mastered about as well as a record can be mastered. The sound is REAL and BELIEVABLE.
When have you ever heard a modern remastering with this kind of depth and width to the soundstage? I have yet to have the pleasure and I’ve played scores of them, close to a hundred I would guess. We used to carry all that Heavy Vinyl back in the day and I played them and reviewed them as they came out, rejecting a good 80% right from the get go. None, not one, ever sounded like this.
This price for a reissue might seem to be a stretch, but we know an amazing record when we hear one, and we know that the next copy that comes along is very unlikely to sound as good as this one does. That’s simply “regression toward the mean,” a reality we have learned to respect. We don’t sell our records based on their reputations. We sell them based on the sound inscribed in their grooves, and these are some mighty fine grooves on both of these sides.