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Earlier this week I had
a rather bizarre experience with my digital music collection. I'd
visited the online sales website of a well-known British classical
record company in order to buy a rather wonderful new recording of E.
J. Moeran's solo songs, which came out recently as a double CD and
features a number of world première recordings. Everything went
pretty smoothly, though, with more file type options than we offer,
and 58 tracks to manage, it was slightly confusing at times even for
me. Anyway, by the end of it all I had a ZIP file with all the tracks
as CD-quality FLACs safely downloaded onto my hard drive, ready to
unpack and save to my audio server.
Once this was done I
went downstairs to the living room and started up XBMC on my audio PC
in order to add the Moeran to the program's extensive database of
70,000+ tracks, ready for playback. I then selected Recently Added
Albums, and that's when the
trouble started...
First
of all there was nothing listed that said Moeran, Solo Songs,
or
indeed anything apparently related to my new purchase. What was now at
the top of the list was four new albums, each of the same name and
each in some sort of code. Well it didn't take a complete genius to
spot that each of these was named after the CD's catalogue number –
but why four? Surely this was only a double album?
I
opened one of the 'albums' and soon realised what had happened –
with multiple soloists for the various songs, the collection had
registered as four separate albums, each by different artists but
each with the same title.
Time,
therefore, for a little re-tagging. Just about every digital music
file has the ability to hold a wealth of additional information about
itself within the file in something called the ID3 tag. Thus, in
addition to the raw file name, which may of course prove very handy
when you're scrolling through your folders and files in Windows,
inside the file itself there may be all sorts of extra text and
picture information in addition to the music.
Take
one
of our own FLAC files, for example. Alongside the music is the
following information: Track Title, Track Artist, Album
Title, Composer, Album Artist, Year, Track Number, Genre, Additional
Notes, and Cover
Artwork. Sounds like rather a
lot, doesn't it? Well actually I have to tell you that there's scope
for much even more than that. An opera MP3 could be programmed to
hold the complete libretto, for example. You can add details of the
conductor, librettist, publisher, website address, tempo and much
more, if you so desire.
Anyway,
it
was time to investigate and get fixing. I fired up one of the most
useful little utility programs anyone with a digital music collection
can own, Tag Tuner (www.tagtuner.com,
Windows only –
other similar products are available on all platforms),
to see exactly what was going on and, if necessary, rectify it.
First
of
all I realised that all the files were out of sequence – the
track numbering scheme was completely confused, most probably due to
there being a double CD in a single folder. No problem for Tag Tuner
– ordering the file display by track name got them into the right
order, then selecting them all and hitting CTRL-F
and Return replaced
all the incorrect numbers with a proper sequence, from 1 to 58. Now
I'd get the songs played in the right order, at least.
But
what
about those album titles and multiple appearances? Still with
all the tracks selected I erased the record catalogue number from the
Album Title box and typed “MOERAN Complete Solo Songs (Chandos,
2010)” in its place. I then added “Various Artists/John Talbot”
in the unfilled space for Album Artist (Talbot is the accompanist),
allowing XBMC to see a unified album artist as well as individual
singers for different songs. I then added “Moeran” to the
composer box, the rather bizarre “9” in the year field was
corrected to 2010, and finally I whizzed over to the record company's
website so I could drag and drop the cover artwork into Tag Tuner's
empty picture box. A single mouse click and my PC got busy adding all
of this information to each of the FLAC files. I also did some
tidying up of the cumbersome track titles, again using an automated
feature that allowed me to zap all the files in one hit.
Finally
I was ready to try again with XBMC. This time it worked a treat when
I re-scanned the folder containing all the tracks. A single album was
now found, with all 58 songs in the right order, a sensible album
title that would show up in any search, and a nice shot of the CD
cover popped up on the display whenever a track was playing.
It's
so
easy to get all of this right – and yet so easy to get it wrong.
When your PC is hunting through thousands of tracks, it really
doesn't care if “Gladys Knight” is spelled with or without a K,
or whether The Pips are preceded with “and” or “&”. It
doesn't realise that “Beatles” and “The Beatles” both refer
to four blokes from Liverpool who were around in the sixties, and it
has no idea that “Bach”, “J S Bach” and “J. S. Bach” are
more than likely one and the same baroque genius. If you have these
variants in your collection it's up to you to fix them, or spend a
long time looking for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club
Band.
And
because there are no rules governing the tagging of files, it's the
one thing you might find you want to get your hands dirty under the
bonnet (or hood, for our US readers!) tweaking, tuning and altering
your music collection. Take a look at Tag Tuner (and its ilk - any
good program of this type will do all sorts of things to help you
out.) If you select a folder with a single CD of music in it within
Tag Tuner you can click a button to scan for the contents and search
the Internet for information on that disc; if it's better than what
you already have (if anything) you can apply the new data in one go.
Working like this you can quickly run through a whole load of CDs,
very useful if you've already spent a long time encoding them from
your collection onto your hard drive. If you're lucky the software
might just recognise an LP transfer - and supply the cover artwork as
well!
Ultimately
any digital music collection is rendered pointless if you can't find
anything that's in it, and your ability to find a specific recording
is going to be entirely dependent on the quality of the information
stored in your collection's database, drawn from the music files
themselves. Spending a little time fine-tuning this is time well
spent – time you'll save the next time you want to find Gladys
Knight & The Pips singing Midnight Train to Georgia,
or indeed Roderick Williams singing Maltworms
with John Talbot at the piano, the song Moeran co-wrote with his
friend and regular drinking partner, composer Peter Warlock, one
boozy afternoon in The Five Bells
pub in Kent in 1926...
Andrew Rose
Further news: Two new PADMC drives
We're pleased to announce this
week two new drives to our line-up of options for purchasers of the
Pristine Audio Digital Music Collection, which now runs to around 900
recordings and nearly 200GB of music files.
For those
on the move you can now buy the collection on a superb and truly tiny
Lacie 500GB portable drive, which takes power from your USB port. It's
just about the smallest external hard drive on the market, but comes
out exceptional well in independent speed and quality tests. Slip one
in your pocket next time you go away on holiday!
At the
other end of the scale, we're also offering the Western Digital My Book
Studio Edition II in its 2TB edition, formatted as 2 x 1TB mirrored
RAID drives and finally available for Mac users as well as PC owners.
The drive has plenty of space for all your music files and arrives set
up to automatically back itself up, so you have effectively two
collections for the price of one for maximum safety and security.
For further details on both of
these and our full range - please enquire if you have specific
requirements not met on our website - visit our Digital Music
Collection pages here.
London
Symphony Orchestra
conducted by Josef Krips Recorded
in 1950 and 1951
Transfers
by Andrew Rose from the Pristine Audio collection
XR remastering by Andrew Rose at Pristine Audio, April-June 2010
Cover artwork based on a photograph of Josef Krips
Krips' Brahms "sensitive, vigorous, and poised to a
nicety"
Superb
new transfer finally does proper justice to marvellous recordings
BRAHMSSymphony No. 4 in E
minor, Op. 98[notes/score] Recorded
17th, 19th & 20th April, 1950, Kingsway Hall, London
First issued in October 1950 as Decca LXT2517
Transferred from Ace of Clubs ACL.132
MOZARTSymphony No. 39 in E
flat major, K.543[notes/score] Recorded
18th December, 1951, Kingsway Hall, London
Transfered from and first issued in the UK in June 1952 as Decca LXT2689
"It
has become fashionable in recent years to belittle Brahms's achievement
as a symphonist. Some critics have gone so far as to say that Brahms in
wasn't really a symphonist, which suggests to me that they aren't
really critics...
One
might not care for Brahms's idiom, but that is no reason for trying to
deny the existence of Brahms's architectural genius. "The defence of
his works," says Tovey, "is an infinitely more faithful line of
criticism than that of attack; for attacks are easy on superficial
grounds, while the defence rests on bedrock." The bedrock of the Fourth
Symphony is a masterly display of musical invention and imagination
that is demonstrable by analysis. But to the average music-lover
musical architecture is a quality that is felt intuitively rather than
recognised by analysis. So the fact remains that most people who have
ears to hear, nerves to feel, and a sublime ignorance of technical
principles find the romantic fervour and sheer musical beauty of the
Fourth Symphony a great experience.
And
I think they will find the performance of the London Symphony Orchestra
under Krips reproduces superbly this great experience. There are no
histrionics about Krips's reading, in which everything is beautifully
proportioned and carefully calculated. The music moves forward to its
natural climaxes, in each of the four movements, with a wonderful
feeling of inevitability that leads logically and dramatically to the
crowning achievement of the great Finale. The orchestral playing is
sensitive, vigorous, and poised to a nicety, and the recording does
full justice to it. I look forward to the issue of this recording on
78's"
Excerpt
from LP review inThe
Gramophone, November 1950by
R. H.
BRAHMS:Symphony
4 -MOZART:Symphony 39
When this Brahms LP recording was issued in the autumn of
1950, the reviewer inThe
Gramophonenoted that
what he was now looking forward to was its release on 78s, presumeably
so he could really hear it properly!
But even on the then new-fangled vinyl he heard enough to
know this was one of the great recordings, and sixty years later it
remains so - both in terms of performance and sound quality.
You may have come across both of these recordings in a
2003 Decca box set. We can only suggest their own transfers were
botched: slowed down, hissy, hard-toned. Hear them now in their true
glory!
One
has to smile today at the final sentence in theGramophonereview reproduced above of
Decca's 1950 LP issue of this recording - the 78s referred to appeared
a few months after the Brahms Symphony's vinyl issue, and it's hard to
believe today that many critics seriously felt that 78s had more to
offer the music lover than the LP which so swiftly eradicated them
after half a century of total dominance.
For
sure some of the early LPs could be a bit hit and miss, quality wise,
and the same can be said for the recordings, as witnessed here.
Analysis of the 1950 Brahms recording shows a true full frequency
response heading right up to the maximum available on a modern CD,
whereas the 1951 Mozart recording, made by the same company in the same
hall with the same producer, orchestra and conductor (the engineer in
unknown for the Brahms but the legendary Kenneth Wilkinson was chief
knob-twiddler for the Mozart) peters out with an upper limit of 12kHz,
something one might have expected from a wartime recording, but not in
late 1951.
But
it seems that even today these recordings have suffered. Having first
heard the quality of the LPs from which these transfers were taken, I
was rather surprised to hear the hard-toned, overly-hissy and quite
flat-pitched transfers they received in a Decca CD issue a very few
short years ago. I had heard the Brahms first, and was delighted by
both the performance and the recording, especially after initial
investigations (using XR remastering for my own pleasure). When I heard
how much improvement I had been able to make over Decca's own CD
transfers I decided to press on, later adding the Mozart to the set for
this release.
The
sound here is clear, clean, full and well-focussed, perhaps more so in
the Brahms than the Mozart, with its aforementioned frequency
deficiency. Both, however, are a clear improvement on the now
apparently-deleted Decca CD box set of 2003.
Andrew
Rose
Available
as
320kbps Ambient Stereo MP3, 16-bit Ambient Stereo FLAC, 24-bit Ambient Stereo FLAC, Ambient Stereo CD
or
listen on demand with
Pristine
Audio Direct
Access
(PADA)
Herman
Krebbers, violin
Theo Olof, violin
The Hague Philharmonic Orchestra
conducted by Willem van Otterloo Recorded
in 1955
Symphony
recorded 28-30 November, 1955
Issued as Philips LP A 00487 L
Transfers by Andrew Rose from the Pristine Audio collection
XR remastering by Andrew Rose at Pristine Audio, April-June 2010
Cover artwork based on a photograph of Henk Badings
Superb
sound quality from these mid-50s Philips recordings
BADINGSConcerto for Two
Violins, No. 1 (1954) Herman
Krebbers, violin Theo Olof, violin
BADINGSSymphony No. 3 (1934) Recorded
28-30 November, 1955
Played byThe
Hague Philharmonic Orchestra conductorWillem
van Otterloo
BADINGS: Double Violin Concerto -
Symphony 3
Henk Badings was possibly Holland's most prolific
composer of the 20th Century. A true multidisciplinary genius, his
musical work spans a wide range of oeuvres and techniques, and would
come to embrace microtonality and electronic music.
These two works are among the finest of his more
'traditional' output - the 3rd Symphony of 1934 is regarded by many as
his best, and the Concerto for Two Violins on 1954 was quickly
recognised as a modern masterpiece in the Netherlands.
These two recordings are impeccably well-made and
well-played, and are surely essential from this fascinating and
multi-faceted composer.
Badings
Concerto for Two Violins No. 1 (1954) 1st mvt. - Pesante
(Ambient
Stereo version)
Notes
on the recordings:
These recordings both date from the mid 1950s - I've been able to
date the Symphony recording to 28-30 November 1955; it seems safe to
assume the Concerto for Two Violins was contemporary, though I'm pretty
certain they were not recorded at the same sessions.
What is particularly unusual about the Concerto recording is that it
sounds quite distinctly like a continuous performance, including the
gaps between movements. In many recordings of the 1950s there's a clear
and obvious cut of silence between movements on the master tape, where
oxide-free 'leader' tape would be inserted to create a section of total
silence. Indeed, these were too often rather roughly inserted, cutting
off the decay of the last note of a movement quite abruptly and
requiring the careful use of a little extra digital reverberation to
mask the 'chop'!
Not here - I got a clear impression of the musicians stopping and
waiting between movements - small sounds of preparation that one simply
doesn't expect to hear outside of a live recording. Of course I may be
entirely mistaken and the engineers may simply have edited in some
background 'atmos' rather than going to complete silence. Either way,
it's a more convincing approach to making a studio recording resemble a
continuous performance than some recordings of the era.
It should be said that both of these recordings were excellent.
Philips has a deservedly fine reputation for quality at this point in
their history, and the following year the composer, Badings, was to
take up residency at their main studios to begin work on some of his
earliest electronic compositions. No doubt when he heard these
recordings he was suitably impressed!
Andrew
Rose
Available
as
320kbps Ambient Stereo MP3, 16-bit Ambient Stereo FLAC, 24-bit Ambient Stereo FLAC, Ambient Stereo CD
or
listen on demand with
Pristine
Audio Direct
Access
(PADA)
New
MP3
transfers
at
PADA
Exclusives
by Dr. John Duffy
in Ambient Stereo
History
of the Cello
Vols. 9 & 10: "The
Old Men"
"1st Chair, NY Phil"
& Series Conclusion
Julius
Klengel
Featuring
Cellists:
Heinrich Grunfeld
Anton Hekking
Julius Klengel
Alfred Wallenstein
Heinrich Kruse
Emanuel Feuermann
Final
part of a ten-volume series
charting
the
historic
recordings
of
cello
music
in the 78rpm era, replete with rare and important recordings by the
greatest players of the first half of the 20th Century.
This
History
of
the
Cello
series
follows
our
earlier
PADA
Exclusives
presentation
of
collections from the Thomas Clear limited edition LP
transfer releases, for which we can now also supply scans of Clear-s
original typewritten notes:
History
of
Chamber
Music:
History
of
the
Violin:
This
transfer
is
presented
with
Ambient
Stereo
remastering
by
Dr.
John
Duffy.
Over
400
PADA
Exclusives
recordings
are
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for
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streamed
listening
and
free
224kbps MP3 download to all subscribers.
Remastered
by
Dr John Duffy In Ambient Stereo
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or stream this recording and many others from only One Euro a
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Virgil THOMSON(1896 - 1989)
Suite: The Mother of Us All (1947) [13:49] Johannes BRAHMS(1833 - 1897)
Symphony No.2 in D, op.73 (1877) [35:43] Emmanuel CHABRIER(1841 - 1894)
Marche Joyeuse - Marche Française (1888) [4:32]
New York Philharmonic Orchestra/Leopold Stokowski
rec. live 2 April 1950 Carnegie Hall, New York
Ned Rorem took lessons from Virgil Thomson in the
early forties in exchange for pocket money and duties as a copyist.
Having observed Thomson at close quarters, in one of his diaries, Rorem
made the point that after working on Thomson’s scores he knew how
Thomson composed but he had no idea of why he composed. Whilst I can
understand Rorem’s comment, I cannot agree with it. Obviously, to the
younger composer Thomson’s seeming naivety must have rankled - does the
simplicity of the music mean it was created by an idiot savant or an
idiot, or is it that Thomson was really a seer? This is truly the crux
of the matter. Thomson was a well trained and very knowledgeable
musician; a conductor, composer and music journalist. His catalogue is
huge and includes work in all forms, some are simple little pieces - he
wrote many Portraits of friends, which are delicate miniatures - and
there are operas, ballets and symphonies. Perhaps his works didn’t
plumb the depths of human emotion, perhaps some of his pieces are
slight, but he is never dull.
The Mother of Us All is an opera with a libretto by Gertrude Stein. It
tells of Susan B Anthony, one of the major figures in women’s suffrage
in the USA. This suite has three movemets - Prelude, Cold Weather and
Political Meeting - and they are written in Thomson’s usual, charming,
easy going Americana voice. It’s a very enjoyable work, nothing
serious, the middle movement is simply about weather with no other
emotional connotation, and it’s given a nicely bluff performance which
helps to point the jokes.
Stokowski’s performance of the Brahms Symphony is very interesting for
he tends towards fast tempi on occasion, which will raise some
eyebrows. The first movement is marked Allegro non troppo - not too
fast - but Stokowski ignores the non troppo part and goes for a brisk,
but, it must be said, never rushed, allegro. What this does is to
heighten the tension and drama - this may be a kind of pastoral
symphony but it still has some dramatic parts to it. The slow movement
is marked Adagio non troppo and here Stokowski really gets it right,
with some gorgeous string playing, and a strong sense of line. The
scherzo is perfect in pacing in the outer 3/8 sections, hurried, but
again not rushed, in the 2/4 middle section. What is interesting, and
very satisfying, is how he marries the two musics together with ease.
The finale begins with the most exciting pianissimo statement of the
main theme, before Stokowski unleashes a climax of some power. Again
the tempo is brisk, but every note is in place and articulated with
clarity. There have been few conductors who could have achieved what
Stokowski achieves here in this way. It’s certainly a unique
performance and not one I would choose if I could only have one
performance of the work on my shelf, but as a Stokowski fan it’s a
performance I wouldn’t want to be without for this conductor was
nothing if not inspirational and music can always live with the
performance given for the moment, not for the recording studio.
The Marche Joyeuse recorded here is Chabrier’s Joyeuse Marche. I know
that Marche Joyeuse is the correct French but the composer chose the
other title and I wonder why its name has been Frenchified here. Do
Americans call it Marche Joyeuse, against the composers wishes? Who
cares? This is a spirited performance if without either the charm or
the delicacy of Beecham - it was one of his lollipops - but it makes a
fabulous end to a very exciting and stimulating concert.
The sound is what you would expect from a 60 year old recording, but
it’s quite bright, almost throughout, and once the ear adjusts it’s
easy to listen to. The CD also includes the radio announcer which gives
a real period feel to the recording. Even though these performances
aren’t what we’re used to, they are sparkling examples of music making
in its most vivid sense and, it must be said, the old magician has done
it again, making us reappraise our understanding and feelings towards
an accepted masterpiece, and take account of a new work. Hurrah!
Bob Briggs
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Herman
Krebbers, violin
Virgil THOMSON (1896 - 1989) 
For those
on the move you can now buy the collection on a superb and truly tiny
Lacie 500GB portable drive, which takes power from your USB port. It's
just about the smallest external hard drive on the market, but comes
out exceptional well in independent speed and quality tests. Slip one
in your pocket next time you go away on holiday!
At the
other end of the scale, we're also offering the Western Digital My Book
Studio Edition II in its 2TB edition, formatted as 2 x 1TB mirrored
RAID drives and finally available for Mac users as well as PC owners.
The drive has plenty of space for all your music files and arrives set
up to automatically back itself up, so you have effectively two
collections for the price of one for maximum safety and security.
