Prom 69: 5.09.16 - Staatskapelle Berlin and Daniel Barenboim

[BBMmk2]

Hi JLW, as ever many thanks for you great insights into a live concert performance. Most interesting to read, as always! Haven't listened yet but I will today.

[symphony1010]

Well. as so many have praised it, maybe I ought to re-listen.
I heard via radio and it sounded a bit clumsy and strangely boxy. I kept wondering if the BBC had done anything with sound balance between the Mozart and the Bruckner.
For me, not a patch on Bohm.

Starting to listen now and I would say that the BBC are even introducing significant compression on their digital feed. This robs us of one of the most essential elements in Bruckner's music - dynamic contrast. The st movement soft horn opening level was basically too loud and so the engineer is forced to throttle back as the first climax develops. I'm sure it sounded great in the hall. I thought the policy now was to apply compression to FM but not the streamed digital feed at 320 kbps. I'm not sure what happens with DAB but I suspect DAB would sound pretty dreadful in this repertoire.

[EnemyoftheStoat]

I'm not sure what happens with DAB but I suspect DAB would sound pretty dreadful in this repertoire.

I didn't know his middle initial was A.

[Dave2002]

From up in the circle the Bruckner sounded pretty good, though I'm sure it would have sounded quite a lot better from lower down. I will try to listen again to the R3 rendition.

I wasn't too struck with the Mozart though. The piano was large, but even so it didn't make much of an impact up in the higher parts of the hall. I would prefer to hear this in a smaller hall, with a piano to match. For me this just didn't work anything like as well as with some period orchestras and matching soloists, or a pianist who seems more attuned to Mozart's work. I'm not absolutely against performances on modern instruments, but a lot of pianists just don't get things right, and the orchestra doesn't always balance well either. Someone like Krystian Zimerman is really well worth hearing.

it may also be the case that the Mozart sounded better on R3 - depending on how the sounds were balanced. I do have several sets of Mozart piano concertos, including the earlier ones by Barenboim, and they are good, but not my absolute favourites.

Barenboim as a pianist is very good in some music - probably Beethoven, but at least from where I heard it, I was not enamoured of his Mozart. I did think that the Bruckner was superb though, and on balance I enjoyed it quite a bit more than Rattle's BSO Mahler 7. DB did look slightly stressed though - I hope he's OK.

[Bryn]

Starting to listen now and I would say that the BBC are even introducing significant compression on their digital feed. This robs us of one of the most essential elements in Bruckner's music - dynamic contrast. The st movement soft horn opening level was basically too loud and so the engineer is forced to throttle back as the first climax develops. I'm sure it sounded great in the hall. I thought the policy now was to apply compression to FM but not the streamed digital feed at 320 kbps. I'm not sure what happens with DAB but I suspect DAB would sound pretty dreadful in this repertoire.

Definitely not the case. I have just checked out the wave print of the whole Prom and there is absolutely no sign of dynamic compression. Standard practice appears to be to aim for a headroom of around 6dB to allow for unexpectedly high peaks. In Prom 69 the largest peak was -2 dB in the left channel during the finale of the Bruckner. The peak during the quietest ambient level just before the Mozart was -54dB. A dynamic range of 52dB from Hall with audience ambience to peak level is pretty impressive. I suggest it is your playback system that is introducing any such compression you perceive. Dynamic compression is a real bugbear of mine. It hit the Prom of Havergal Brian's Gothic a couple or so years back (the Belohlavek performance of Janacek's Glagolitic, too) suffering from severely from dynamic limiting you could lay a ruler along. In the case of the Gothic it is still to be found in the Hyperion CD issue of that performance. The Perrys'' team (as confirmed to me in a email from Simon of that ilk) did what they could with what the BBC lumbered them with, but the limiting is still there.

[By the way, though they use quite different CODECs for the lossy encoding, (resulting in marginal differences in their dynamic ranges) I am pretty sure the same source material is used for both.]