Classical Music for Aficionados

I just rediscovered a wonderful version of the Symphonic Dances by an old colleague of Rachmaninoff’s: Eugene Ormandy with the Philadelphia Orchestra.Really outstanding performance.  Maybe my current favorite version.
On my system, the sonics are much better on this cheapo Sony Essential Classics label than on the super highly touted Reference Recording label with the Minnesota Orchestra. 

 Pardon me while I digress into audiophilia. I don’t know how others feel, but I, for one, have never liked the sound of Reference Recordings, no matter how good my system gets.
i find the sound perspective distant and Ill defined. The opposite of Mercury Living Presence, which may to some be a little too close up, but which I greatly prefer.
Please forgive my rant!

I listen to Classical Music because it lifts up my heart and soul in a way that nothing else does . I have ZERO doubt if I had not just
stumbled into it, I would be a FAR worst person than the sinner I am still.


It is what it is , the Greatest Achievement of Western Civilization .I know it , I say it and will till the day I die !Educated and not so educated folks in every corner of the world also know this , try and get a Symphonic ticket in Tokyo .



Of course good sound is nice but is secondary at the end of the day unless you vomit .
I’ve heard of the Ormandy, I shall look again .




P.S . the opinion of a first class musician is scarcely a rant .

I think this question has came up many times in the past here but I think there is still time to give it an airing so here goes . Do any of you ever dismiss a recording because the recording quality is dire.

I am ashamed to say that I have done in the past and am still doing, case in point is Claudio Arrau's very early stuff say 30s and 40s. I have some of his records which I have put away because the sonics are horrible. One of the ones being a case in point is his 1944 Bach Goldberg Variations which when looked upon subjectively is an interpretation which is most definitely as good as the Glen Gould 1955 one. For a start Arrau's rubato's are not as extreme as Gould's but Arrau is every bit as good a technician as Gould himself and in fact Gould seems to play this version as if he was playing Chopin's etudes ( a bit extreme but I hope you get my drift  ). It is not just the  monotonous hiss and crackles, and that just gets worse the farther back you go but to me I just cannot countenance any of the bad frequency hills and troughs. The recording quality pre war was not great to put it mildly but it did favour some frequencies far more than others and that is why say you are valiantly listening to some of Beethoven's piano sonatas and every time the pianist  hits an F sharp the volume of the piano explodes in your ear with a very significant rise in volume and a very distorted sound also. As I have been talking about Arrau I used to have a copy of the Phillip's series Great pianists of the Twentieth Century, they had what they said was probably Arrau's earliest
recording Balakirev's Islamay. Now through this what I can only say sounds like a continuous blast of white noise and very low level audio I can just discern what I think sounds like a piano being hammered is this torrent of notes. Now this was in 1928 and it was indeed very primitive recording quality. Earlier in the acoustic recording era we had Ferruccio Busoni who went to but down some acetates and he played one or two of his most famous Bach transcriptions and the recording engineer came  out and then asked him to play this note harder than the rest and here are a couple of notes you need to play softer. He did try but gave up in disgust. As one of his friends said of that day "how can you record Busoni , it's like bottling an ocean ). 

newbee . I’l look for the Estonian , a very musical tongue in all they do.Say hello to Avro Part for me .

Though I almost always go to Russians on Russian Music  .

jim, IMHO there is nothing wrong with how you feel about poorly recorded music. I have many, well at least quite a few, records which I bought solely because of the quality of the performance despite the poor quality of the recording. I wanted to be informed. I listened and my curiosity was satisfied. I put them away and rarely have a desire to hear them again. Quite a few of these were old 'live' performances. Richter's Mussorgorsky's Pictures is a clear example. Sonics are terrible but you are unlikely to hear a more exciting performance. 

RV, Ormandy was my intro to Symphonic dances. I still prefer your previous  recommendation of Ashkenazy's.

 FWIW I agree with you about RR recordings, and I feel much the same way about Telarc recordings but for different reasons. I have more that I don't listen to than I do. That said I'm a sucker for RR's Copland Symphony #3. Also some of the earlier RR's are quite good as well. I've always enjoyed Keith Clarks recordings with the Pacific Symphony of the Menotti and Barber VC's and Copland's Appalachian Spring in its original 13 instrument version and which includes Eight Poems of Emily Dickinson sung by Marni Nixon, and a rarely heard Ourdoor Overture. The Telarc recording of Barbers Symphony #1 which includes Higdon's Blue Cathedral and Theofanidis' Rainbow Body is another disc I really enjoy for the music, especially the two modern pieces.

Babies and bathwater......:-)