SR-90226

Stravinsky / The Firebird – Dorati

More of the Music of Igor Stravinsky

  • With STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound on both sides, this early Mercury pressing of Stravinsky’s Classical Masterpiece is doing everything right
  • One listen to either side of this pressing and you’ll see why this is one of the top Mercury titles of all time
  • The Heavy Vinyl reissues – at 45 or 33, on one disc or four – barely begin to capture the energy and drive Dorati brings to the work
  • “The magic lies in the elaborate orchestration and the excitingly uneven rhythmic writing. Stravinsky changes the orchestration of his themes at each repetition, breaks them down into their constituent parts, pushes their accents across the bar-line, and moves them out of sync with their own accompaniments.”
  • There are about 150 orchestral recordings we think offer the best performances with the highest quality sound. This record is certainly deserving of a place on that list.
  • 1960 was a great year for classical recordings – other Must Own Orchestral releases can be found here.

This is one of the more challenging classical shootouts for us to get going. At least 80% of the copies we buy these days — for many, many hundreds of dollars each, I might add — go right back to the seller. This is one of the more reasonably quiet copies we’ve come across recently, making it a special one indeed.

Both sides are so clear, alive, and transparent, with huge hall space extending wall to wall and floor to ceiling. Zero compression.

This pressing boasts rich, sweet strings, especially for a Mercury. Both sides really get quiet in places, a sure sign that all the dynamics of the master tape were protected in the mastering of this copy.

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Orchestral Music Is the Ultimate Test for Proper Turntable-Arm-Cartridge Setup

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Stravinsky Available Now

Dorati’s performance of The Firebird for Mercury is excellent for adjusting tracking weight, VTA, azimuth and the like.

A huge and powerful recording such as The Firebird quickly separates the men from the boys when it comes to the honest recreation of an orchestra performing live in a concert hall.

Recordings of this quality are the reason $10,000+ front ends exist in the first place. Just ask Robert Brook.

You don’t need to spend that kind of money to play this record, but if you do, this might just be the record that will show you what you got for all your hard-earned dough.

Ideally you would want to work your setup magic at home with this record, then take it to a friend’s house and see if the same results could be achieved on his system.

I actually did this sort of thing for years.

Sadly, not so much anymore; nobody I know can play records such as these the way we can.

Playing and critically evaluating records all day, every day, year after year, you get pretty good at it. And the more you do it, the easier it gets.

UPDATE 2025

The above was written about ten years ago. By then I had learned enough to know that all the systems my audio friends owned were woefully inadequate to the proper reproducton of sonic blockbusters such as The Firebird. They simply hadn’t spent the money on their equipment or done the tweaking and tuning work that it takes to play a magnificent recording such as this.

It was about this time that I stopped visiting them. In my experience, mediocre sound is not simply a matter of being less enjoyable than good sound. In fact, I found it to be the opposite of enjoyable. It was frustrating, irritating and unpleasant, and I wanted no part of it. My friends couldn’t hear what was wrong — they had nothing better to compare the sound to. I knew how much better it could sound because I had the killer pressings and the highly-tweaked system that were able to work magic on orchestral spectaculars like The Firebird. (More on that subject here.)

By the way, Robert Brook can get your front end tuned up and working right.

We highly recommend his new service. It might just put you on the path to achieving the next level in audio. (You will definitely struggle to get there with a table, arm and cartridge that aren’t set up with a high degree of precision by a person who knows what they are doing, and Robert has been doing this work for years now.)

Properly set VTA is especially critical on this record, as it is on most classical recordings. The smallest change will dramatically affect the timbre, texture and harmonic information of the strings, as well as all the other instruments of the symphony orchestra of course.

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Classic Records 45 RPM Recut – This Is Your Idea of a Great Firebird?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Igor Stravinsky Available Now

Many years ago, a customer alerted me to a review Wayne Garcia wrote about various VPI platters and the rim drive, and this is what I wrote back to him:

Steve, after starting to read Wayne’s take on the platters, I came across this:

That mind-blowing epiphany that I hadn’t quite reached with the Rim Drive/Super Platter happened within seconds after I lowered the stylus onto the “Infernal Dance” episode of Stravinsky’s Firebird (45 rpm single-sided Classic Records reissue of the incomparable Dorati/LSO Mercury Living Presence recording).

That is one of my half-dozen or so favorite orchestral recordings, and I have played it countless times.

This is why I have so little faith in reviewers. I played that very record not two weeks ago (04/2010) against a good original and the recut was at best passable in comparison. If a reviewer cannot hear such an obvious difference in quality, why believe anything he has to say?

The reason we say that no reviewer can be trusted is that you cannot find a reviewer who does not say good things about demonstrably mediocre and even just plain awful records. It’s the only real evidence we have for their credibility, and the evidence is almost always damning.

I want a reviewer who knows better than to play such an underwhelming pressing and then waste my time telling me about it. He should tell us what a good record sounds like with this equipment mod. Then I might give more credence to what he has to say.

Reviewer malpractice? We’ve been writing about it for more than 25 years.

P.S.

This is one of the Classic Records titles on Harry Pearson’s TAS List of Super Discs(!)

P.P.S.

Allow me to quote a writer with his own website devoted to explaining and judging classical recordings of all kinds. His initials are A.S. for those of you who have been to his site.

Classic Records Reissues (both 33 and 45 RPM) – These are, by far, the best sounding Mercury pressings. Unfortunately, only six records were ever released by Classic. Three of them (Ravel, Prokofiev and Stravinsky) are among the very finest sounding records ever made by anyone. Every audiophile (with a turntable) should have these “big three”.

Obviously we could not disagree more. I’ve played all six of the Classic Mercury’s. The Chabrier, Ravel and Prokofiev titles are actually even worse than the Stravinsky we reviewed.

This same reviewer raved about a record we thought had godawful sound, Romantic Russia on MoFi, a label that never met an orchestral string section it didn’t think needed brightening.

Find me a Mobile Fidelity classical record with that little SR/2 in the dead wax that does not have bright string tone. I have yet to hear one.

What is it with audiophile record reviewers? They seem to be taken in by the most unnatural sounding pressings. The world is full of wonderful vintage pressings that have no such problems. If you are an audiophile who feels himself qualified to write about records, shouldn’t you at least be able to hear the difference between a phony audiophile pressing and the vintage pressings it supposedly improved?

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