Messages

Parry for me.  3, 4 and 5 grip me from first bar to last.  The Fourth is probably the finest, but I love the breezy quality of 3 too.  With Stanford, there are many beauties but my attention is usually not maintained so strongly.  I love the Boult version of Parry 5 which was his very last recording at the end of a marvellous career.  May be rose tinted specs from when I bought it on HMV LP in Queens Road, Bristol in 1980 but I think it stands up very well (I think Boult was around 90 at the time.)  I remember thinking the playing was a bit ragged then, but strangely I don't notice that so much now.  The Symphonic Variations are rather splendid too.....

Significantly, the length they take to play movements is often only seconds apart.

Is that really significant, though?  I'll wager that there are dozens of recordings of Beethoven 5 which clock movement times within seconds.  I'll also bet that some are superb and others are mediocre (or worse).  I don't think you can pass up performances on the basis that they are too similar in tempo to others - especially when Gernsheim doesn't come along as frequently as London buses...

And no, Kalkbrenner was used to his instrument, just as we are used to ours--he may well have preferred the cleaner, crisper sound  and the mechanism that required less force to play and the faster tempi that those two differences allow--if he had had the choice.

We can look backwards - Kalkbrenner couldn't look forwards.....  He couldn't prefer something he couldn't know - as you say he didn't have the choice.  We can.  And I do.

My Raff 3 was afflicted by bronzing - along with several other ASV's, lots of Hyperions and also some Albany discs of George Lloyd.  All the companies replaced them then - but that was before ASV were taken over (by Sanctuary, I think).  All collectors who have a large library and who therefore play some discs rarely should check these labels in particular for problems.  But there are other companies who used PDO as a pressing plant too.

Since the problem appears to be acid in the booklet paper reacting with the lacquer, it would be sensible to store PDO pressed discs apart from their booklets if they cannot be replaced and are still playable.  Or, as suggested, burn them to CD-R and/or rip them to hard disc.  However, I think any discs which are going to be problematic will have shown symptoms by now.  I replaced mine around 10 years ago.

Also - Järvi's Atterberg recordings have surged ahead with the Gothenburg SO.  Are we still so hung up about nationalism that Järvi can only do a Swedish composer in Gothenburg and a Swiss - German composer in Geneva?  That smacks of "Elgar can only be performed by English orchestras and conductors - no-one else 'gets' the idiom".  Which is nonsense as several recent excellent Elgar recordings show.....

D'Avalos' Im Walde is superbly played and recorded, for a start; it also has a certain 'rightness' about its choice of tempi. In other words, it's an excellent, central performance which avoids extremes, but which brings out the full stature of the work.

Alan is spot-on here.  The D'Avalos recording was the first Raff I ever heard, and I was completely smitten.  It got me into the whole UC scene.  If you are a Raffian (or a UC fan) and have not heard it, I urge you to do so.  As Alan says, the engineering and virtuosity of the Philharmonia are both stunning.  D'Avalos may not have set the world on fire but I enjoy his Martucci too.

I'm much more upset at the loss of the opportunity to hear Järvi in Raff 4.  That's another fine work which rather sits in the shadow of 3 & 5 (which for me are the two greatest) but which is marvellous in its own right.

@ Ilja : Point taken. 

But nothing at all prevents the connection of a huge external HDD to a laptop via USB.  I admit it's not very portable, but you wouldn't want to cart your entire library from place to place anyway. 

I'm not against people using mp3 at all, but for people starting to rip a large collection from scratch it's important they make informed choices.  Rip a few thousand CDs to mp3 and you can't change your mind later without doing it all again!

WAV files take up around twice as much space as FLAC.  Although they offer no advantages over FLAC (or APE) - all are lossless - it's fine to use them as you'll still get 7,500 CDs on a 5Tb drive 

[pence]

Yes, that's true.

Alternatively, discs like that can be ripped so that the whole work is in one large file.  That eliminates the problem too.

I won't ever use mp3 though.  A 5Tb external HDD now costs just over £100 from some UK sellers.  That's enough for around 15,000 CDs in FLAC.  Another way of looking at that is that you are paying 0.7 pence to store each CD.  Even with a backup drive, that's only 1.4 pence per disc.  CD audio compression is simply a waste of time now.

It IS an inherent flaw actually - I don't routinely trust Wikipedia but ...Lossy audio compression schemes that are based on overlapping time/frequency transforms add a small amount of padding silence to the beginning and end of each track. These silences increase the playtime of the compressed audio data. If not trimmed off upon playback, the two silences played consecutively over a track boundary will appear as a pause in the original audio content. Lossless formats are not prone to this problem.

This is correct.

You are right though, that some players cope with this better than others and manage to strip some if not all of the silence out.

I'd rather not take a chance on the hardware's abilities and prefer to have gapless files to begin with.  Just my two penn'orth.....

One problem with mp3 that doesn't seem to have been discussed is that in works with continuous music over track boundaries, there is almost always a tiny audible gap introduced during playback.  The format was never designed to cope with gapless playback.  FLAC however plays back gaplessly with no problem.  Given the lossy nature of mp3, the tumbling cost of storage and the increasing speed of internet connections, I can see no justification at all for using mp3 either for ripping or downloading.  An mp3 rip of Eine Alpensinfonie with more than a dozen tiny breaks is likely to provide a disappointing listening experience.

I only need three words to sum up Brian Couzens' achievements for me (others will choose different ones):

Parry
Stanford
Bax

RIP Brian

To get back to the Granados, to imply that the second or third movements are what Granados might have composed is fanciful.  I like the disk for what it is, one movement by Granados and flights of fancy by another. 

Can't remember for certain offhand, but is it not the case that the Elgar 3 sketches were almost non-existant for the Finale?  I seem to remember Anthony Payne admitting that he's had to imagine Elgar's wishes far more here than in the other movements.  So the situation is far from clear-cut even in this celebrated example... 

I absolutely agree that it's not great by any means and I'd also assert that the Elgar/Payne Symphony 3 is staggeringly good.  Seems like others would agree.  Even if the outcomes are variable, realisations / orchestrations / completions are sometimes wonderful.  But yes, the covers should tell the full story.

[both]

I used a poor choice of words and I've always had trouble with the 'a' in his name. I suspect that Vaughan-Williams knew he was going to create a symphony and did the film for money.

... and although trivial both of you seem to want to hyphenate his names  ...

Regarding the Elgar PC, the cover couldn't be clearer, I don't believe it does any damage to Elgar's reputation whatever and it's a guilty pleasure of mine too.  I don't need profound stuff all day every day...