More of the Music of Jacques Offenbach
UPDATE 2020
Our favorite recording of the work now is this one: Fistoulari recorded for Readers Digest.
It’s also an excellent record to test with. As you no doubt know, there is a lot of “action” in this piece of music.
To get the strings and the brass to sound lively yet natural is a bit of a trick. (It doesn’t help that the polarity is reversed.)
When I first played this record many years ago, I was none too happy about the string tone. After making a few tweaky adjustments, the strings became much clearer and more textured. The overall presentation still sounded rich, but was now dramatically more natural and relaxed.
It was this record that made me realize some of the changes I had made to my stereo back then had caused it to have a certain hi-fi-ish quality, which seemed to work fine on the popular and jazz recordings I was using as test discs at the time.
But the reproduction of classical music is the ultimate challenge for any stereo.