Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Edvard Grieg Available Now
The commentary reproduced down below is from 2005. It is unlikely that the pressing we liked at the time, a Stereo Treasury LP of the famous Fjeldstad performance, would come anywhere close to winning a shootout these days. We simply don’t buy them anymore. We stick to the pressings that have done well for us over the last twenty years in shootout after shootout.
Peer Gynt is a Masterpiece that deserves a place at the heart of any classical collection of the greatest recordings of all time.
If you want to improve the quality of pressings in your collection, by far the best way to go about it is to start doing your own shootouts. A great deal of this blog is dedicated to helping you learn how to do that.
Oddly enough, there actually are budget reissues that win shootouts. They just happen to be Ace of Diamonds pressings and not Stereo Treasurys. (You can see a picture of the pressing we like at the bottom of this post.)
The Wonderful Peer Gynt
Our favorite recording of Peer Gynt is the one by Otto Gruner-hegge and the Oslo Philharmonic from 1959.
The only other reading of the work with top quality sonics is the one that won our proto-shootout twenty years ago, the one with Fjeldstad and the London Symphony Orchestra.
Speaking of budget reissues, we are on record as having been fans of a great many budget classical LPs stretching back decades. My catalogs from the 90s were full of reissues with exceptionally good sound.
Doing things as we do them now, by following rigorous testing protocols, has made it possible for us to discover some budget pressings that are so well-mastered they have the potential — accent on the word potential — to win shootouts.