| Review by Domimag November 24, 2007 (8 of 9 found this review helpful)
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The Mozart Violin Concertos by Fischer and Kreisberg were very interesting. With Nikolic playing the viola, this new release is an absolute marvel. We have clearly here a large and symphonic version of the main score (sinfonia concertante), the best as I could hear till now.
Both soloists have a frank dialogue, well balanced and no one try to be the leader. Kreizberg offer a very good orchestral accompaniment.
The others pieces on this SACD are not well known and, personnally, I have no landmark on it.
The sound has more bass support and is more reverberant than the recent Helmchen-Nikolic (with the same orchester). The reason is certainly this one has been recorded in a church.
Pentatone's ingeneers made as usual a wonderful job !
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| Review by Jonalogic September 16, 2010 (7 of 18 found this review helpful)
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Following my recent strand on over-marking, these performances are going to get what they truly deserve, without any gloss or political finessing. So, those of a delicate disposition should turn away, now. You have been warned.
I just loved Julia Fischer’s performances of the Mozart violin concertos. Her sweet, luscious tone and innate musicality and style brought great joy and delight to all of us on these two SACDs. I felt she was not particularly well served by the recording engineers on these discs, though.
On this disc of the great K364 Sinfonia Concertante and two lesser pieces, regretfully, things have broken down a bit. Her playing is as wondrous as ever, but communications seem to have broken down a bit with her fellow soloist and the orchestra. Overall, the performances are somewhat more disjoint and do not flow in quite the same effortless way as the previous solo concertos. I am giving the performances 4 stars, therefore. A shame.
Now we come to the sound, and here the blood starts to flow. This recording was unlucky. It followed a long string of live performances I had attended. So, I was well attuned to the ‘Absolute Sound’ by then.
It was with a shock, therefore, that I first heard the present recording on my Esoteric SACD spinner. From the first bars, it didn’t sound right. It never ‘focussed up’, even when I varied the volume level. Although basically inoffensive, it sounds bloated and mushy, nothing like real string soloists playing in front of a real orchestra in a real concert hall.
The spot-miked soloists on this recording are overly-large and unfocussed. They don’t sound like real violins or violas. The temporal and spatial nonlinearities are sufficiently marked on this recording that there are also in-band tonal problems: in particular, the violin has no gleam, shimmer or air to its upper registers and harmonics. That’s all lost in the general mush.
The recessed orchestra is much worse. It’s comically unfocussed, woolly and has had a large dollop of incoherent generic reverb masking detail. Instruments congeal into a porridge-like mass with no instrumental separation or dimensionality. Let me ask, just where are the horns coming from, guys?
It is at this point that I will express a fundamental criticism of Polyhymnia recordings. They sound to me as if they have been engineered to sound ‘nice’ rather than accurate. This is nothing new to Polyhymnia, or its predecessor - Philips Classics. Listening to the great (performance-wise) Philips 70’s recording of the Beethoven violin concerto with Grumiaux reveals a stunningly similar overall presentation of a violin concerto- with a fat, bloated violin lurching around in front of a muzzy, indistinct and reverb-laden orchestra. So, they don’t seem to have fundamentally altered their ideas on miking violin concertos over the past 37 years… clearly, Philips house rules apply.
I applaud Polyhymnia for their technological innovation and customisation of signal-path electronics, head amps etc. However, this effort is all to naught if they continue with their palpably unnatural and over-miked recording techniques. This is the downfall of most of their recordings.
Recording and balancing violin concertos is not easy, I will grant you. After listening to the present recording, I spun up the Heifitz SACDs of the Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky concertos (paired respectively with the Brahms and Beethoven). Putting aside the music for the moment - not easy, with such a violin genius! - I’d like to consider the sound on these late 50’s and early 60’s recordings.
Basically, everything that the Polyhymnia engineers get wrong on this Mozart recording, Lewis Layton does right on the Living Stereos. Here we are presented with a realistically sized violin, with accurate timbres and upper registers, playing in front of a real orchestra – with depth and height layering, all set in a recognisable, coherent acoustic. So, it can be done!
It would be unfair to say that these 50 year-old recordings sound better than the 2007 all-digital DSD effort. No, in fact, they annihilate the modern recording, trample on its bones, set fire to them and then dance on the ashes.
Don’t believe me? Just LISTEN, dammit.
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