Hearing is believing

My bottomless contempt for commercial recordings of art music is well documented in this blog.  Yet even I would not have believed that this level of incompetence could be found in a CD released by one of the oldest and biggest classical labels, EMI.
     Here are the last 12 seconds of the piano solo from the Siciliano of Bach's Keyboard Concerto BWV 1053, recorded (digitally!) in the late 1980s by Andrei Gavrilov and Neville Marriner.  What happens with the entrance of the orchestra is something for which (in my opinion) the producer and the engineer/editor of this recording should have been shot without trial (along with countless so-called record critics/reviewers who never mentioned such an obvious case of gross incompetence).

This industry, which has shamelessly fucked the paying public so much and for so long, surely deserves its nearly complete disintegration from online piracy.

The face of evil

Meet Philipp Nedel, the remastering engineer for the 2012 DVD issue of "Horowitz in Vienna" - the first DVD release of the recital previously available 'officially' only on a VHS stereo tape.  Since I have a copy of that VHS tape (in a pirate DVD transfer from Japan), it took me only a few minutes of listening to Mr. Nedel's work to appreciate the remarkable consistency with which major classical labels (in this case Sony) entrust restoration of historically invaluable recordings to incompetent and evil motherfuckers like Mr. Nedel and the issue producer Robert Russ.  (Unfortunately the latter's photo could not be found on the web.  Perhaps Mr. Russ suspects that the quality of his work makes it prudent for him to do what he can to remain maximally anonymous.)

greed... vandalism... high culture...

Imagine a restaurant which serves food in the following manner:  They begin by  serving you a part of your first course.  After you finish that, they clear the table and a bit later bring you the remainder of the first course along with a part of the second course.  And that's how your dinner continues, with each course being split between two servings.

The reason why no restaurant would ever dare to implement the above serving policy is obvious.   The very first group of customers would simply burn the motherfucker down without even waiting for dessert.  And afterward they would drag the owner to a nearby parking lot for a brief chat about the importance of making one's business model conform to some minimal standards of rationality.

There is one line of business, however, where the customers accept this kind of perverse treatment willingly, even enthusiastically.  The product in this line of business is "food for the soul", and it comes in the form of recordings of classical music.

RECORDING TECHNOLOGY: SHOCKING NEWS

22 APRIL, 2011
After many years of unsuccessful efforts, the researchers at IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) finally identified the set of giant pillows through which the celebrated sound engineer Tony Faulkner recorded many CDs for the Hyperion label.  The news of this amazing discovery spread like wildfire through the world of classical record labels.
     Said Dr. Gunther Editmann of Deutsche Grammophon: "We tried for years to duplicate that uniquely muffled, fuzzy, and disembodied sound for which Mr Faulkner is so famous.  Alas, no matter how hard we tried, our recordings still made the instruments sound somewhat similar to what they sound like in real life.  Now, thanks to the brilliant scientists at IRCAM, we can finally guarantee that the sounds on our recordings will bear no resemblance whatsoever to any musical instrument you may encounter in the concert hall."
     Dr. Editmann's enthusiasm was echoed by Nick Splicer of EMI Classics: "It is not only our new recordings, but also our extensive catalog of historical treasures that will benefit from Tony Faulkner's "pillow sound" technology.  For example, in our many previous remasterings of Schnabel's Beethoven sonatas we used tons of filtering, re-equalization, dynamic compression, and other radical sound-altering methods.  Yet despite our best efforts, one could still tell that Schnabel was playing the piano.  With the new pillow-sound remastering no one will be sure about that anymore - just as no one is quite sure about the instruments played on Hyperion recordings."
     Although Mr. Faulkner declined to comment, there are persistent industry rumors that he is trying to stay ahead of the competition by testing new materials through which to record music, including mattresses, rubber flotation devices, and heavy-duty thermal insulation.

Honest lying...

I was simply curious to hear how much musical value Sony got for their $3,000,000.00 advance paid to this musical midget, so I brought the "Lang Lang live in Vienna" CD home from the library.  What I heard on this CD told me unequivocally that Sony got about as much for all that dough as (I would guess) one could get for a few hundred bucks from a Las Vegas whore: a cynical and vulgar substitute for the real thing.

BMG's special place in Hell

As part of the HOROWITZ: THE ORIGINAL JACKET EDITION, RCA (and Sony) included a CD of the pianist's 25th Anniversary Carnegie Hall Concert of Feb.25, 1953.  On the CD cover (presumably the original LP cover reduced in size) it is stated clearly and boldly, albeit in smaller print:
ACTUAL recording of the Carnegie Hall concert of February 25, 1953

As the first cursory listening of the Schubert B-flat Sonata revealed, this "ACTUAL" recording is full of post-concert edits.  The edits are not properly matched in "perceived volume".  And at least one splice - at 5:47 of the Finale -  MISSED THE LAST NOTE OF THE BAR (1/8th value)!

Any apologists for classical record companies out there, who want to explain to me why this does not constitute a clear case of consumer fraud? And if the present day re-issue "specialists" at BMG-Sony simply did not notice all the splices and botched editing before charging unsuspecting music lovers for this fraudulently titled piece of sonic garbage, their level of incompetence is truly staggering.