More of the music of Gustav Holst (1874-1934)
More Reviews and Commentaries for The Planets
This is what we here at Better Records refer to as blockbuster sound.
Even on the best copies, the recording does not sound very much like a live orchestra, nor is it trying to.
It’s trying to be huge and powerful in your home.
Which is more in line with a rock Demo Disc such as Crime of the Century or Dark Side of the Moon.
Everything has been carefully and artificially placed in the soundfield. Each instrument or group of intstruments is given its own space and (sometimes ridiculous) location.
It’s clearly not the recreation of a live orchestral event. No live concert I have ever attended sounds anything like this record.
Instead it’s the actual creation of a unique orchestral sound, with unique staging of its own design. Lots of microphones were used, which cause instruments and sometimes whole sections of the orchestra to appear in places and take up spaces they could not possibly occupy.
If your stereo images well, with three-dimensional staging and depth, you will have no trouble hearing what we are talking about with any pressing of the album.
This is the sound that Bernard Herrmann made such wonderful use of with his series of Phase IV recordings for Decca, rather different than the four mics and two stereo channels of the Fiedler Gaite Parisienne from RCA in 1954.
Which is ironic. HP talked about The Absolute Sound of live unamplified music as being the standard, yet somehow this recording ended up in his Top Twelve all time greats. Makes no sense to me, but neither do many of the records on the TAS super disc list.
That said, our current favorite Planets is the other Planets on the TAS List, Previn’s performance for EMI.
If I were in charge of the TAS super disc list, I certainly would not have put this record on it.
Here are some others that we do not think qualify as super discs.