Lyrita is a specialist classical music label that made some of the finest recordings of orchestral music in the 1970s, and quite a few were included in Harry Pearson’s Super Disc list in The Absolute Sound. Here we have a wonderful album of Gustav Holst’s music, the schoolteacher who composed in his spare time and composed The Planets.
Lyrita recordings are extremely dynamic and hard to reproduce on most hifi. On my Quads they sounded a bit too bright. On the big SL’s, they sound gorgeous. Thus recording starts with the Walt Whitman overture that has a lot of loud brass sections, but sounds rich and well-balanced. Strings are rich and have that famous Lyrita shimmer. Kenneth Wilkinson made many of Lyrita’s famous recordings as well as Decca’s legendary recordings.
Here’s one of my favorite orchestral recordings from Telarc featuring the music of Samuel Barber. He lived in the same town that I lived in for a few years in the early 1990s, Mount Kisco, NY. Legend has it that Barber sent some of his early pieces to the great conductor Arturo Toscanini who returned it some time later without comment. When on a trip to Italy a friend suggested they visit Toscanini, Barber demurred. When the friend visited Toscanini and made apologies for Barber’s absence, Toscanini said he understood that Barber was miffed about the music he had received and not commented on. He told the friend to assure Barber that he was indeed going to perform Barber’s magnificent Essay for Orchestra. Toscanini was capable of. memorizing a score from one reading and never conducted an orchestra with a score in hand.
This is a stunning recording with a huge dynamic range, which features Telarc’s famous bass drum that makes your heart stop. It sounds great on the SL. I’m still not playing the SL’s really loud to give the panels time to stretch out. Plus I don’t yet have my big ARC 750SE’s hooked up. On the diminutive Mola Mola Kaluga class D amplifiers, the crescendos are heard but not as powerful as a big tube amplifier would generate.
On this same disc, a quieter and profound piece is Barber’s Adagio for Strings, possibly the finest piece for strings written by an American composer. It was popularized by the movie The Platoon. What a gorgeous piece of music it is. Rich and warm sounding, the climaxes build up slowly. On the big SL’s this movement is spellbinding.
Composers can be strange creatures sometimes. They fall in love with a particular genre and can’t stop writing for it. Vivaldi wrote hundreds of violin concertos. Haydn wrote scores of Baryton trios, possibly because his employer in whose court he worked loved to play the baryton, a relative of the cello. Anton Reicha similarly loved writing woodwind quintets. He wrote scores of them. Thanks to the prodigious effort of the Albert Schweitzer quintet, we can hear all of them. They play phenomenally and are recorded in an exemplary way.
Woodwind quintets, here featuring a flute, a bassoon, a horn, an oboe and a clarinet are extremely revealing of a loudspeaker’s midrange colorations. The big SL’s reproduce a woodwind quintet better than anything else I’ve heard. The horn here is placed well behind the other instruments and you hear its authoritative sound bathed in ambience. The flute is on extreme left, the clarinet on the right and the basoon and oboe share the center stage. What emerges is a musical conversation between the instruments. One can see why Reicha was so fascinated by the woodwind quintet. He enjoyed creating this pentatonic conversation between these instruments. Lovely music that’s never coarse or loud and never outstays its welcome.
