Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now
It’s been quite a while since I played the Classic pressing, twenty years or more, but I remember it as none-too-impressive, playing into my natural prejudice against the earliest Living Stereo recordings and Classic Records themselves.
UPDATE 2025
Having heard some amazingly good sounding ones since this review was written many years ago, we are no longer prejudiced against the “earliest Living Stereo releases.” Many of them have superb sound.
The original is not good either in our experience. The only version of this wonderful performance from 1955, the best we know of, is this very late reissue that we discovered more than twenty years ago, a sleeper of a record if ever there was one.
When you hear how good it sounds, you may have a hard time believing that it’s a budget reissue from 1976, but that’s precisely what it is.
Even more extraordinary, the right copies are the ones that win shootouts.