Review by Windsurfer August 23, 2006 (6 of 7 found this review helpful)
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Performance: Sonics: |
krisjan just a few days ago (August 21, 2006) reviewed this saying: "It amazes how good the sound is from these ~45 year old recordings." I agree! Given the age of these, the sound is truly amazing. But I take issue with Krisjan when he asks: "Have we really progressed all that much in recorded sound since then?" and then suggests that we may have regressed!
As wonderful as these are, in giving us a flavor of the art of Heifetz, it seems to me that most of the multi-channel DSD recordings, and many sourced as PCM that I have recently acquired stand head and shoulders above these for sounding more like live music performed in a real concert hall and much less like an electro-mechanical experience than these superb souveniers if you will, of the violinistic wonder that was Heifetz.
Here, the orchestra is recorded with a big hole in the middle such that it sounds like two separate bodies one on the left and one on the right. There is incipient overload distortion, never truly obnoxious as in some others of this series (such as the otherwise superb Monteux Franck Symphony), but it is noticable. Unless you make allowances for its age, this is far from outstanding sound quality.
So buy these for the best sound you will ever hear from Heifetz, but don't be deluded by any notions that recent PentaTones, Harmonia Mundis, Tudors, BIS, Telarcs, Sonys, RCO Lives, new BMGs and about a dozen or more of others aren't far, far exceeding the sound quality of what is on this disc.
My ratings are (to borrow a phrase from PN), six out of five for performance and 2-1/2 for sound, down from 3, because the master was recorded so as to make his violin seem seven feet wide!
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