Popular Post gmgraves Posted March 16, 2021 Popular Post Share Posted March 16, 2021 New Performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony From Reference Recordings By George Graves Everybody knows or knows of Beethoven’s last and arguably greatest symphony: The Symphony #9 in D minor, Opus 125. It’s stirring last movement, the “Ode to Joy” is probably one of the worlds best known melodies. Only the “dot-dot-dot-dah” from the opening of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony is better known and that is a hold-over from WWII because it’s actually Morse code for the letter “V” for victory over the Nazis by the Allies (something I always found somewhat ironic given that Beethoven was German and it was victory over the Germans that the Allies were after!). This new recording, by Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony from the folks at Reference Recordings is part of their “Fresh!” series which basically means that it wasn’t recorded by Professor Johnson, Reference’s main recording guru. Instead, most of the Fresh! recordings are made by a Boston based company called Sound/Mirror and they have captured all of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra titles released by Reference so far. The Sound This is an audiophile forum, so it should surprise no one that the recording’s sound should be of primary importance here, and so it is. This recording was captured in Direct Stream Digital (DSD) in Heinz Hall for the Performing Arts in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania on June the 6th through the 9th 2019. The recording itself is hard to criticize. The sound-stage is extremely spacious, with good ambiance. Being a DSD recording, the ambiance trails off naturally and is not truncated as it would be in standard CD resolution titles. However, image specificity is somewhat vague. Images aren’t well anchored in the musician’s locations and vary in width with little front-to-back separation. This is normal for this type of miking arrangement and in practice, often varies with recording location. Otherwise, the sound of the recording played back through an SACD player, has tremendous dynamic range, and solid, deep bass with silken, very natural highs. The DPA microphones are free of large peaks and seem to have their natural diaphragm resonant peaks above 20 Khz. There is no rising treble peak in the 8-10 Khz region here! Overall, when compared to other stereo performances of Beethoven’s Ninth with which I compared it (Bruno Walter, NY Philharmonic [Columbia, 1957] and Herbert von Karajan, Berlin Philharmonic [DGG, 1961]) The Walter had similar imaging (due, no doubt to similar mike deployment) but the von Karajan images gorgeously (MS true stereo microphone technique). Of course, overall, this Fresh!Recording is miles ahead on overall sound and falls short of the DGG recording only in the latter’s use of true stereo miking techniques for superior image specificity. This recording was released by Reference in it’s native SACD format (it’s a hybrid SACD so it’s playable on regular CD players with or without HDCD decoding). For this review, I have chosen to listen by way of the SACD layer played through my Denafrips Pontus DAC from my Oppo UDP-205 (used as a transport) and my Chinese no-name HDMI to I2S converter. Reading through the technical information in the booklet, I notice that Sound/Mirror chose to use five DPA 4006 omnidirectional microphones (DPA used to be called B&K) to cover the overall orchestra with spot-mikes used to fill-in “where necessary”. Now, I understand the reason why many recording organizations choose to use omni mikes to cover an orchestra. Omnis generally have much flatter frequency response over their entire pickup area than do other mike flavors such as cardioids or bi-directional (figure-of-eight) types. The DPA 4006s are exceptional in this regard, having a measured frequency response of 10 Hz-20KHz +/- 2dB and are an inconspicuous 0.6 inches in diameter and only 6.7 inches long. I generally have two problems with this type of microphone setup. One is that being omnidirectional in nature, separation between mikes is difficult to achieve, often requiring physical barriers (called in the industry, gobos) between instrumental sections to keep the sound from one part of the ensemble from bleeding over into another. Secondly, while the resulting “stereo” mix from a plethora of microphones does result in a two channel recording, it can hardly be called “stereophonic sound”. But here, I suspect (from listening), that the five microphones used in this recording were arrayed as in is the classic “Mercury Living Presence” mike technique. That is to say, one mike on the left side of the orchestra, one in the center (behind the podium) and a third on the right side of the orchestra. This technique (or variations thereof) has been used by many other labels such as Telarc (for most of their classical music recordings). The two remaining mikes used on this particular recording would likely have been deployed in the rear of the venue for ambiance retrieval. This is, of course, merely a guess on my part, as I wasn’t there. I’m simply going by what I hear. Performance Most people know that Beethoven wrote this symphony very late in his career after becoming totally deaf. This is quite an accomplishment, and many musical scholars have wondered, over the years, how he could have accomplished it without help. Some believe that his student, Ferdinand Ries, may have helped Beethoven by transcribing the Maestro’s ideas to the piano. But there is no evidence that this is so. Still, it is said that Beethoven’s deafness caused him to make a number of orchestration mistakes. If so, maybe a musicologist can hear them, but most of the world’s music lovers could care less. The work is a masterpiece and certainly Beethoven’s Magnum Opus. This performance while very workmanlike and extremely competent, is by no means the best reading of this work on record. But it is certainly far from the worst. In my opinion, the best reading of the Ninth on record is Bruno Walter’s 1957 recording for Columbia (now Sony Classical). Second on my list is the recorded performance by George Szell with the Cleveland Orchestra (Epic/Columbia) recorded as part of his entire Beethoven Symphony cycle recorded between 1957 and 1964. My third choice (and best for realistic sound-stage) is the von Karajan, recorded in the early 1960’s. I also like the Toscanini version, recorded in the early 1950’s but it is mono and sounds a bit old fashioned. It is famous, however because the second movement was used for many years as the “theme” for the “Huntley-Brinkley Report” newscast on NBC. It was chosen because it was recorded in Studio 8H in the RCA building in Rockefeller Square in NYC; the same studio where the newscast originated. Like most of Toscanini’s recordings, modern scholars think that it is a rushed performance, with a hurried tempo. This is understandable, as Toscanini was accustomed to performing for 78 RPM records, which are good for approximately 4 minutes on a 12-inch side! While there are other, perhaps better, performances of this work (there are literally scores of stereo performances available of this work, and I doubt that anyone has heard them all and I’m no exception), this must surely be the best sounding. For this reason, I highly recommend this Pittsburgh Symphony recording of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Maestro Manfred Honeck does a excellent job of getting a fine performance from the assembled instrumentalists and vocalists. Understand that even though there are better performances doesn’t mean that there is anything wrong with this one. I plan to make this recording my go-to for Beethoven’s Ninth. It sounds so good that it’s a pleasure to listen to it. Bravo Reference Recordings! firedog, Musicophile, orresearch and 1 other 1 3 George Link to comment
Recommended Posts
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now