Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now
In 2007, we wrote the following review for The Power of the Orchestra, VCS 2659:
DEMO DISC QUALITY ORCHESTRAL SOUND like you will not believe. We put two top copies together to bring you the ultimate-sounding Pictures At An Exhibition. Folks, it doesn’t get any better than this for huge orchestral dynamics and energy.
I confess I badly misjudged this record over the course of the last few years. I remember liking it in the early ’90s; at that time it was the only Golden Age recording of Pictures whose performance moved me. I never liked the famous Reiner, LSC 2201, and Ansermet’s performance on London also lacks drive and coherency in my opinion.
I then went on to extoll the many virtues of the recording, making special mention of the brass, dynamics and bass, which you can read about here.
More recently we played a copy of VCS 2659 in one of our regular Pictures at an Exhibition shootouts and were not the least bit impressed by it.
Side One:
Steely and opaque, not that good.
Side Two:
Strings are not very [unintelligible, might be bright], not much weight.
In other words, it just sounded like an old record.