Classical Music for Aficionados

Schubert,

Yes,  I believe the two greatest Rachmaninoff conductors today are Pletnev and Ashkenazy, both extraordinary pianists as well. (Although Ashkenazy just retired.)

Rachmaninoff's Vespers - FWIW

Re music recommendations vs audiophile recommendations, to paraphrase rvpiano, one must be aware of your audience's priorities when making recommendations. Fortunately, in this case it really is a win/win proposition.

Schubert recently made a recommendation for Vesper's, more correctly known as All-Night Vigil, but called both, and it is hard to find fault with his recommendation. The music in this recording is simply magnificent. The opening with the basses just grabs you and on you go. If it's the only version you have, great. Very Russian I think. I wouldn't be without it!

However, for folks who are audiophiles, such as we have in this forum, there are other recordings which present a valid alternative,  performance wise as well as recording quality. 
The one I have in mind is All-Night Vigil by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir led by Paul Hiller (Harmonia  Mundi 907384). Apart from the differences in performance, which I will pass on discussing here as those differences are, as always, a matter of personal preference, the acoustic and presentation of the voices, for both the choir members and soloists, has much greater clarity and the recording has a greater sense of transparency and openness. 

Personally I could be happy with either!  

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 ).