Post by Christopher WebberThe piece is too luxurious to be heard solely in that older Walter
recording.
[snip]
Post by Christopher WebberBut the Walter just has so much more power and majesty than either
Measham or Zinman, especially at the climax of the slow section, that I
can forgive the limited dynamic range (1945) and even Pearl's mushy
transfer. Is the Sony transfer miles better?
I haven't heard the Pearl CD, but I own the Sony one, and have a
couple of comments. Since I haven't heard the Pearl I probably can't
answer your question definitively, but here's what I have to say for
what it might be worth:
The Sony CD was made from a playing of the 16" lacquer discs on
which the recording was mastered at the 1945 session. Unless whoever
prepared the Pearl transfer had access to the Columbia (Sony) vaults
containing those masters, which I strongly doubt, the transfer is
likely to have come from a playing of Columbia's commercial 78-rpm
discs.
Bad news. Because those commercial 78s (you probably know this) were
not pressed from copies of masters made at the session(s), like other
companies' records, but were derived from dubbings that had been made
later of the lacquer masters to prepare 78 masters. Sound quality was
lost in the process as a result.
I owned and knew the commercial 78s of Walter's Barber 1 for
decades, and can only say that the Sony CD transfer was and is much,
much superior. The bass is clean, finally. In fact, it can finally be
heard. The overall sound is clean, never "mushy," as the 78s are in
places. If the Pearl transfer has such sound, as was said, I suppose
the 78s were used for it.
Columbia never issued Walter's Barber 1 on LP, so the Sony CD is the
first chance to hear it from the masters. Typically for Columbia in
the '40s there is no tonal color at all to the orchestra's sound --
they managed to do that to the Philadelphia Orchestra too! -- at the
same time that RCA Victor was preserving the subtle and gorgeous tonal
colors of Koussevitzky's Boston Symphony, to be heard in their
recordings.
I hope I've addressed your question about transfers of Walter's
Barber 1! Sorry to have rambled so.
Others have done Barber 1 well too of course, but I have great
affection for Bruno Walter's recording, not least because he conducted
music by a number of American composers and gave (I believe) the world
premiere of Barber's Essay no. 2 and never got to record any of those
works, but because I think his performance of the symphony is an
eloquent one.
Don Tait