0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic. Read 545867 times.
I’m listening to it right now, wonderful! The first batch of cds arrived yesterday, this along with the Lutz/Kantaten no 13 and the Ensemble 415 Handel Flavio. Hooray! A full weekend of fun with time out for the World Series. The Bach cd booklet mentions that in addition to the cds the Bach Foundation also produces dvds of the St Gallen concerts. Have you heard/seen the dvds? All this makes me want to move to Switzerland just for the remainder of the series. Thanks as always,Lester
Copland "Billy the Kid" ---a great way to start the day. Donald Johannes and the Dallas Sym Orchestra. Went to school with his daughter when I was a kid.This may be the best version of this on vinyl.
I bought that record when it was first issued 50 years ago (and probably still have it}. That particular budget label was issuing many interesting discs at the time. $1.98 at Discount Records in Ann Arbor. Same for Nonesuch Lps of that time.
Nonesuch and Vox have traditionally been such crappy pressings, one wonders how the Johannes/Dallas recordings were so well recorded and pressed. Did they contract out to RCA or other presses? The Dallas symphony hall back then had atrocious acoustics. These Johannes recordings were made in the smallish McFarland Auditorium at SMU. I played a student recital there back in the 60's. Wish I knew more about the sound engineers on them- they did a fine job.
I was going to add a comment on the atrocious pressings, esp. Vox and Vox Turnabout but didn't. Nonesuch were a tad better, imo. Those old Vox Boxes had very interesting music but the pressings made them nearly unplayable. (Been buying a few as reissued on CD.) Those Dallas recordings, thinking of one of Ives "Holidays Symphony" also, were very up-close, excessively so, but they sure were detailed and clear sounding. You mention RCA. Their pressing were pretty bad, too, I thought, but of course my playback equipment was pretty horrible back in those days.
So many record companies fell into disrepute as the 60's came to an end and the 70's emerged. RCA made a bad decision with Dynagroove, somewhat based on the styli of the times. Then they simply got cheap cutting lp's on vinyl about as thin as wax paper- uhhg, those floppy Red Seals. I've heard that the execs at Columbia, from about 1965 on, were so coked out of their skulls that they had no idea what was going on as to quality. DG got cheap. London/Decca kept to their standards. EMI was quality conscious. Mercury just lost momentum. However, most of the majors seemed to make improvements by 1980, about the time that CD's began to emerge to dominate vinyl. Perhaps with less demand, more time was given to production??