Hi all
I rarely indulge in out and out recommendations - but in this instance it is a case of "Wow"!
A blog site I follow pointed me (a confirmed Brucknerian) in the direction of a recording which has assumed Holy Grail status among believers, but in its latest remastering has now been stripped of years of "varnish" and is astonishing in its vividness and sense of sheer visceral excitement.
The recording is Furtwängler's legendary, high octane, Bruckner 5, made with the BPO between 25-28 October 1942 in Berlin's Alte Philharmonie. The RRG (Reichs Rundfunk Gesellschaft) recordings from 1942-44 were spirited away ('abducted' says the booklet note!) in April 1945 by the occupying Russian forces and taken to Moscow. They never saw light of day again until about 1960 when they began appearing on crude Melodiya pressings.
This particular recording has been issued on CD on numerous labels in the past - from DG in their seminal 1989 box of the Furtwängler's wartime recordings returned from the Soviet Union in October 1987, to Music and Arts (Aaron Z. Snyder's remastering, 2008) and recently as a download from Pristine Audio. But I have never heard it sounding as wonderful as it does on this new issue from Testament, which seems to have slinked out with unreasonably little fanfare.
The reason for the huge improvement in the sound is that the other recordings were sourced from 38cm/s tapes which were Soviet copies of the original German 77cm/s tapes. The latter (after much detective work) were rediscovered in Russia and had survived in remarkably good condition: they have been used for this new Testament release, under licence from Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg.
I have done some comparisons and the new issue blows all its competitors out of the water. I am listening to the mighty 2nd movement adagio as I write and it sounds as if it could be from the late 1950s, with a rich, deep and majestic breadth and revelatory clarity in the inner string writing. The brass chorales, tymps and pizzicati are vivid and amazingly three dimensional and it is, by a long chalk, the very best wartime Furtwängler recording I have (and I have a lot!). The performance itself, needless to say, needs no recommendation from me.
Any Furtwängler fans need to add this to their collection without any hesitation: I'm glad I did! It really is nothing short of astonishing. The recording quality is a testament (no pun intended) both to Furtwängler's original recording engineer (presumably his exclusive sound engineer, Frederick Schnapf, was at work here) and to the remastering work carried out by Paul Baily.
(Oh, and in a pleasing touch, the battered original cardboard tape box cover with its wartime AEG Magnetophon label and much cyrillic scrawl, is reproduced on the back of the booklet).
Here's a link: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B...ef=oss_product
Bws
Karafan
I rarely indulge in out and out recommendations - but in this instance it is a case of "Wow"!
A blog site I follow pointed me (a confirmed Brucknerian) in the direction of a recording which has assumed Holy Grail status among believers, but in its latest remastering has now been stripped of years of "varnish" and is astonishing in its vividness and sense of sheer visceral excitement.
The recording is Furtwängler's legendary, high octane, Bruckner 5, made with the BPO between 25-28 October 1942 in Berlin's Alte Philharmonie. The RRG (Reichs Rundfunk Gesellschaft) recordings from 1942-44 were spirited away ('abducted' says the booklet note!) in April 1945 by the occupying Russian forces and taken to Moscow. They never saw light of day again until about 1960 when they began appearing on crude Melodiya pressings.
This particular recording has been issued on CD on numerous labels in the past - from DG in their seminal 1989 box of the Furtwängler's wartime recordings returned from the Soviet Union in October 1987, to Music and Arts (Aaron Z. Snyder's remastering, 2008) and recently as a download from Pristine Audio. But I have never heard it sounding as wonderful as it does on this new issue from Testament, which seems to have slinked out with unreasonably little fanfare.
The reason for the huge improvement in the sound is that the other recordings were sourced from 38cm/s tapes which were Soviet copies of the original German 77cm/s tapes. The latter (after much detective work) were rediscovered in Russia and had survived in remarkably good condition: they have been used for this new Testament release, under licence from Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg.
I have done some comparisons and the new issue blows all its competitors out of the water. I am listening to the mighty 2nd movement adagio as I write and it sounds as if it could be from the late 1950s, with a rich, deep and majestic breadth and revelatory clarity in the inner string writing. The brass chorales, tymps and pizzicati are vivid and amazingly three dimensional and it is, by a long chalk, the very best wartime Furtwängler recording I have (and I have a lot!). The performance itself, needless to say, needs no recommendation from me.
Any Furtwängler fans need to add this to their collection without any hesitation: I'm glad I did! It really is nothing short of astonishing. The recording quality is a testament (no pun intended) both to Furtwängler's original recording engineer (presumably his exclusive sound engineer, Frederick Schnapf, was at work here) and to the remastering work carried out by Paul Baily.
(Oh, and in a pleasing touch, the battered original cardboard tape box cover with its wartime AEG Magnetophon label and much cyrillic scrawl, is reproduced on the back of the booklet).
Here's a link: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B...ef=oss_product
Bws
Karafan
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