Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin Available Now
UPDATE 2026
This is an album we can no longer find a suitably large supply of clean, early stereo pressings in order to do a proper shootout. It’s a great title, but it turns out it’s just too much work to get anything going for it, so we tagged it as a never again record.
It’s possible we could do it again, but not likely since it’s almost always too noisy to sell, even after a good cleaning,
The bottom line: we see no other option other than to give up on it for now. We love both the music and sound and encourage you to find a nice copy for yourself.
For best results, stick to the Blue Label stereo pressings. There are two, but only one of them sounds good, so if you get a bad one, find one with the same label and different stamper markings.
Our Original Listing from 2011
White Hot Stamper sound on side one – the Tubey Magic is off the scale. Milstein is brilliant on these shorter violin works, 7 in all.
This rare, hard to find original Blue Angel stereo pressing has exquisite sound. As we noted in our listing for Milstein’s Saint-Saens Third, it is the rare Heifetz album on Shaded Dog (or any other label) that could hope to compete with it.
We would rank this Angel pressing with the best of Rabin and Milstein on Capitol, as well as the wonderful Ricci and Campoli discs on London/Decca.
The transparency of both sides lets you “see” the orchestra clearly, without sacrificing richness or weight.
What a record! What a performance from the incomparable Nathan Milstein.
TAS List? Feh!
Definitely side one, and probably even side two of this copy put most of the TAS Super Discs to shame. I would venture to say that there’s a very good chance that you have never heard a violin-led orchestral recording as good as this one.
It’s clearly superior to most of what I take to be the pressings that audiophiles cherish for their putatively superior sonics. (Don’t even bring up that crap that Classic Records pressed of the Heifetz RCAs. They may have impressed the critics and the man-in-the-street audiophile but they sure didn’t do much for us.)
UPDATE #2
Actually, one of them did. Ah, but which one?! Stay tuned to find out.
The fact that this wonderful sound has been found on a lowly domestic Angel pressing is, to me, the icing on the cake.
Side One
Music of Rachmaninoff, Mussorgsky, Glazounov and Tchaikovsky
Huge space, super transparent and awesomely dynamic, this side is killer in every way. The sound is as rich and tubey as any Ricci record on London, and that means VERY rich and tubey. I could not find anything to fault in the sound. Superb in every way.
Side Two
Music of Tchaikovsky-Glazounov and Rimsky-Korsakov
Rich and smooth, with good space, but not quite all the phenomenal transparency of side one. Very musical this way, and the music is sublime.
Side One
Rachmaninoff – Vocalise
Moussorgsky-Rachmanminoff – Hopak
Glazounov – Meditation
Tchaikovsky – Valse Scherzo
Side Two
Tchaikovsky-Glazounov – Meditation
Tchaikovsky-Glazounov – Scherzo
Rimsky-Korsakov – Fantasy on Russian Themes
