Search - Mendelssohn, Lalo, Bruch :: Violin Concerto / Symphonic Espagnole

Substandard Transfers of Great Recordings

dbm1257 | Austin, Texas | 03/06/2000

(2 out of 5 stars)

"When I was growing up, I was given custody of about twenty 78-rpm sets that my grandparents had owned. Some of these were first-class and notable recordings, among them the Lalo "Symphonie espagnole" included on this CD. It was a fiery performance captured by a clear and vivid recording, remarkably so for a pre-LP issue. When I had occasion to look for a CD transfer of it, I decided to spend a little extra money and get Pearl's transfer because of their reputation for presenting clean and honest transfers of the original sources.This disc was a great disappointment.Let it be said first that the performances are just great. The young Milstein is just as brilliant and fiery as I remember him from my childhood listening. The Mendelssohn and Bruch are just as fine as the Lalo. All three conductors (Eugene Ormandy, Bruno Walter, and John Barbirolli) are highly artistic collaborators.The overall sound of this disc is anything but honest. First, the surface noise seems much louder than I have encountered on almost any other commercially issued transfer of old shellac discs. The Lalo is certainly much noisier than I remember it. And I can't imagine that my copy was cleaner than all the others.Second, there is a practice fairly common nowadays when transferring 78s of leaving the original signal in mono but adding artificial reverberation in stereo. (You'll need to listen with a good pair of headphones to hear this for yourself.) When done discreetly, it does make the sound less boxy or constricted. That is not the case here. The reverberation is laid on so thickly that the original recording becomes indistinct and distant.The engineer (credited as Roger Beardsley) also heavily equalizes the recordings. I rarely play a recording myself without employing equalization freely, but this EQ takes out so much of the harsh mid-range that one usually finds in pre-LP recordings that I found myself generously adding the mid-range back. The bass is also boosted well beyond what is necessary.However, the prize-winning error occurs in the last movement of the Lalo, which in the original issue of the recording was split over two sides. In this transfer, the second side sounds as though it begins a beat too early (it is actually a full measure of a very fast, 3/8 tempo). You will hear Milstein's scale that ends the first side fading away into the ether as Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra seem to step on his toes. This, however, is not the fault of the musicians or anyone involved in the original recording but of Mr. Beardsley and the folks at Pearl who allowed this to be released. It is wrong, just plain wrong.One good thing about these great, old recordings in the era of compact discs is that they are out of copyright. I know that there are other issues of these recordings. I'm sorry that I don't know another one that I can recommend personally. Consider yourself warned about THIS one."