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.
Prom 69: 5.09.16 - Staatskapelle Berlin and Daniel Barenboim
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symphony1010
Originally posted by DracoM View PostWell. 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.
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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.
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Originally posted by symphony1010 View PostStarting 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.
[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.]
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