poor quality recordings

I now have a fair few classical cds,but fewm of them really sound ok.Put on a modern produced cd like Moby or Coldplay and the music leaps out at you,as do Andreas Bocelli,and my free Linn cd with Hifi choice has some well recorded pieces on it,but when i buy one they are flat (except the ones that have been recommended in here,which have been excellent)

Classical cds are cheap,and i now know why.I would rather pay a lot more for them and get more enjoyment

the short extract on the Linn cd of Arthur Pizzaro,beethoven sonata n.o 8 is fanastic,stick on the Chopin i bought straight after and i cant listen to it

any recs gladly received

edit just spotted the HDCD light on,

 

sorry,i meant Artur,his brother Arthur is a bit crap really

 

Actually I'd say there's very little correlation between price and quality with classical. Because the recordings often have considerable lasting appeal the same recordings get reissued for decade after decade after decade - many of the 'golden era' analogue recordings from the 60's sound remarkably good in sympathetic modern remasterings. Recordings which were issued at full price maybe as recently as a few years ago are commonly reissued in a budget format by the big labels (Deutsche Grammophon, Philips, EMI, Decca etc.), and the likes of Classics for Pleasure issue many top-class original recordings at really cheap prices (£5-£10 depending on your stockists' markup ). With Naxos you need to buy carefully as their standards are rather variable IME, and at the ultra-cheap end of the market there is a lot of really dreadful stuff about.

Studio-produced pop music is often recorded ultra-close-miked so everything tends to sound really aggressively upfront - most classical music listeners prefer a more natural "concert-hall" type recessed sound. Many concerto recordings from the 60's and 70's tended to have the soloist very close balanced so they jump right out of the speakers at you (try just about anything recorded by Itzhak Perlman, or for example the Pierre Fournier recordings on DG Galleria of the Elgar and Dvorak cello concerti), but nowadays there seems to be a - welcome IMO - trend back towards having everyone set back a little bit.

Edit: as to recommendations, well, what sort of thing are you after? FWIW, a few off the top of my head that spring to mind as being particularly well recorded:


Gardiner's Planets


Zimerman's Ravel


Rattle's Szymanowski


Handley's Vaughan Williams


Gardiner's Verdi

 

I'm with PeteH on this one. Some of the older recordings made by the likes of Walter Legge at Decca come up magnificently. I recently picked up a CD of Nev and the Academy playing two string serenades (Tchaikovsky and Dvorak) and Grieg's "Hollberg Suite"). The latest recording here is 1970, but the Argo engineers knew their business and the recording is crisp, fresh and alive. I have the original vinyl and they both sound great.

Again, as Pete says, the object of classical recording engineers is to reproduce the sound as it would be heard in a concert hall. Somebody on another thread expressed disappointment at classical orchestral sound, but I think he expected each instrument to be etched razor-sharp in the recording, not blending with each other - and blending is exactly what you hear in a concert hall because that's what the composer wanted.

 

I'm with Pete on concerto recordings though. I hate it when they record the solo instrument with a separate mic and then make it much more prominent in the mix - why not just record the whole thing as if you were recording just an orchestra? Afterall, you don't hear the soloist any louder in a real concert.

Personally, I don't see why they have mics all over the place anyway. Why not just a crossed pair in a central location in the auditorium and be done?

Michael.

 

There are definitely bad modern recording and bad old recordings, just as there are good modern and good old recordings.

I've tended to find a lot of recordings on Naxos and other budget labels can be rather flat and lacking in space, but that has not put me off some very good performances.

Early digital recordings from 1980s on major labels are also often congested and coarse sounding, but there are exceptions.

I've found that just about any recording on the Hyperion and BIS labels are usually excellent. Chandos too can be very good but sometimes suffer from over reverberance and too much distance.
Recent issues from Sony, DG etc are generally very good but I think the current fashion for live recordings of concert performances has not helped, even though the performance may be a bit more spontaneous.

The LSO live recordings I've heard so far have been especially disappointing in this respect. Cannot understand the superb reviews they have had either .

Favourite old recordings:
Mahler - Das Lied von der Erde, Klemperer/Philharmonia EMI 1965

Stravinsky Symphonies, conducted by the man himself, early 1960s CBS (not sure if Sony have re-issued but might be superb on 2-channel SACD)

Rachmaninov Orchestral works - Ashkenazy/Concertgebouw early 1980s.

Recent goodies:
Prokofiev/Miaskovsky Cello Concerti Russian national/Pletnev/Maisky, DG from about 5 years ago.

Schubert last 3 sonatas on Sony, Murray Perahia. 2001

Pergolesi Stabat Mater, Allesandrini etc opus 111 (I think) 1999

 

To my ears those actually aren't especially well recorded IIRC - there's lots of reverberation and atmosphere but it's a bit congested and glassy-sounding at the top end (bothers me slightly in for example the massed string tone in the second subject in the first of the Symphonic Dances) and overall not quite as good as the slightly earlier analogue Previn recordings for EMI in terms of realism - both of those are completely murdered in terms of sound quality by the very recent Pletnev set on DG though.

The relative artistic merits of these sets is another matter...

 

This fine record is particularly well recorded: