Soundlab Audiophile G9-7c: a 30-year odyssey fulfilled

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Ok, I had to listen to one more magnificent chamber piece by Brahms, his beautiful clarinet trio composed at the end of his (for an 18th century composer) long life. Brahms was ruthless in his desire to destroy any music that did not meet his high standards. He tore up a lot of his compositions because they did not live up to his ideals. He didn’t leave us with a huge amount of music, unlike Mozart, but what he did leave behind for posterity sealed his fate as one of the truly great composers of classical music.

Just to reinforce my egalitarianism that I’m not hopelessly biased to geriatric performers, here’s a lovely album of Brahms Clarinet Trio by three young musicians who sound lovely in this high resolution recording. I could be happy stranded on a lonely island with nothing to listen to but Brahms’ chamber music. Only a man at the end of his life might compose music that’s as thoughtful and contemplative as this, one who has no need to
Impress anyone anymore, one who simply takes delight in writing down a last few musical bars in celebration of a long and fulfilling life.

Listening to the big SL’s on this album, you get immersed in the sound of three very different instruments, the enchanting sound of a clarinet, the cello that’s not as deep as Rostropovich above and the piano. Three voices that are engaged in a musical conversation that must be heard together and yet must be separated. It’s as if three people are speaking at once and everyone gets heard. Impossible to do it perfectly but the big SL’s get as close to the actual sound of live chamber music as I’ve ever heard it done. The size of the big panels give it a sense of realism that escapes smaller loudspeakers and because no crossover is used, there’s no annoying tonal changes from woofer to tweeter. It’s all seamless, top to bottom, as it should be.

 

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More Brahms? Who can resist? Brahms was a pianist who played in bars and nightclubs in Hamburg in his youth, then as now hardly an epicenter of music like Vienna. One wonders what he played on these occasions for there are obviously no recordings. But he did heave behind a lot of his piano music and this album of his Intermezzi reveals his fascination with shorter forms of concentrated and yet creative freedom of expression. Brahms did not write a lot of sonatas like Beethoven. He was always mindful of being compare to his giant of a predecessor. One imagined he sought to show his talent in ways Beethoven did not.

This is another closely miked piano recording but it’s well balanced and the piano does not sound tinkly. On the big SL’s, there’s a gorgeous tonality to the sound, a warmth and a woodiness that’s reminiscent of the sound of a real piano. Except it’s balanced too close as if you are hunched over the piano yourself eavesdropping while Brahms is playing. For a composer who had a rough youth, this is a highly refined musical piece, one I suspect he did not play in Hamburg’s seedy nightclubs.

 

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Here we have a lovely album of music by John Sheppard, a rather mysterious composer in 16th century England of whom much is not known except he was a choral music professor at Oxford in 1543. He was apparently born when Henry VII defeated the Scots in the Battle of the Flodden Field. He collaborated with Thomas Talllis, another English composer about whom a lot more is known. This album by Stile Antico is a masterclass in both singing and recording. On the big SL’s, the voices are incredibly natural bathed in a lovely ecclesiastical acoustic as befits the music. The 25-minute Media Vita sounds really lovely. Incredibly good sound for a Redbook 44-1khz mastering that sounds better yo my ears than a lot of poorly recorded high res albums. Hyperion is renowned for its choral music albums and this one gets my highest recommendation.

 

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In the past 40-odd years that I’ve enjoyed listening to classical music and invested in hifi, there have been numerous occasions when dealing with life’s innumerable challenges, from ill-health to moves and other crises, has turned me to music for solace. No one cheers me up in such times than the greatest mater of all, I speak of course of Ludwig Van Beethoven who overcame enormous personal disability due to deafness to write music of incomparable beauty and depth. Here we have an incredible album of his cello sonatas played by two legends, the cellist extraordinaire Yo Yo Ma and his long time collaborator Emmanuel Ax. This is a recent high res recording made in Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony.

My favorite is the incredibly sad and yet hopeful Cello Sonata Opus 69 in A Major. The story goes that Beethoven sent an autograph manuscript of the score to his patron inscribed with the words “Hope Among Tears”. Vienna at the time was being bombarded by Napoleon’s army and the cannon fare must have been deafening and shocking. The original note has never been found, so its truth is not known but it’s a great byline for this album recorded at the height of the pandemic.

It’s a glorious recording. Yo Yo Ma plays a couple of notches lighter than Rostropovich who also recorded this sonata for Philips with the great pianist Svatislav Richter, which was not a great recording. On the big SL’s, the glory of the playing stands out. Nothing can lift me up like Beethoven. If you ever get the blues, and who doesn’t, Beethoven’s Opus 69 will lift your spirits up.

From the original liner notes:

“IN 1809, BEETHOVEN SENT A COPY OF SONATA NO. 3 IN A MAJOR, OP. 69 TO HIS FRIEND AND PATRON IGNAZ VON GLEICHENSTEIN WITH THE HANDWRITTEN INSCRIPTION “INTER LACRIMAS ET LUCTUM”

This copy has not been found and the story may be apocryphal, but it is one that I want to believe. Vienna was in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars, and the constant strains of bombardments and assaults on the city were stressful, both physically and psychologically. Beethoven's supporters and intimates, including Gleichenstein and Archduke Rudolph, had left the capital, and the ensuing loneliness, combined with the constant awareness of his ever-increasing deafness, must have been well-nigh intolerable. And yet, when we look to music to give us hope for the future, to believe that we can survive and do good, it is invariably to Beethoven's.“

 

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We end tonight’s musical soirée with another Hyperion album of early Renaissance music from the composer Guilliame Dufay. The massive 40-minute long Missa Sancta Jacobi )Mass of St James the Greater) was composed around 1430, the year Joan of Arc was burned alive at the stake. It was likely performed first in Northern Italy and its patron was Bishop Pietro Emiliani.

The Binchois consort sing beautifully here. They are balanced very closely and on the big SL’s, their voices project out of the panels. It’s like sitting on the first few rows of a choral concert. Lovely music from almost 600 years ago, and yet it achieves a purity of tone that would be hard to equal today.

 

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Listening to one of Coltrane’s famous albums on vinyl courtesy of the ultra-chic Technics SL-10 linear tracking turntable playing into my Mola Mola Makua preamplifier. There’s a school of thought in high end audio that components have to be ginormous to be taken seriously. The SL-10 is a gorgeous sounding turntable. I have mine set up with an ultra rare Shure V15LT specially made for the P-mount design of the SL10. No setting cartridge tracking force or anti skating etc. just plug it in. The only turntable that’s on permanent display at the Museum of Modern Art.

This album sounds very nice under on the big SL’s. It’s a Rudy Van Gelder recording made at his house in Hackensack, NJ, where so many famous jazz albums were recorded. Rudy always has his albums naturally balanced so the imaging is tightly between the loudspeakers.

 

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Hard to believe that even a simple turntable like this can show how natural analog can sound, and make streaming digital seem a bit artificial sounding!

 

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Another lovely jazz vinyl album from Ben Webster and Oscar Peterson recorded in 1959. Webster’s tenor sax here comes across as rich and burnished, a mellifluous sax as you’re ever likely hear. On the big SL panels, the sax sounds incredibly lovely.

 

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As an undergrad I listened to a lot of 70s rock and roll. CSNY was one of the groups that a lot of us listened to. This album is only from CSN. The voices are nicely captured in a closely miked recording that blends acoustic instruments in a folksy kind of way. The voices sound exceptionally natural on the big SL panels. A rare rock recording that does not sound harsh to my ears as too many do. Even the harmonica sounds nice here. I’m playing the high res stream from Qobuz, which sounds a bit sleepy to me compared to the original vinyl. There’s a lot of low frequency on this album and plenty of natural dynamics.

 

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Albert Einstein gave a lot of invited presentations and as someone utterly uninterested in being remunerated for his work, as worldly possessions meant nothing to him, used to suggest he be allowed to play his violin instead for the audience. He often played Mozart violin sonatas. This beautiful DSD recording by pianist extraordinaire Mitsuko Uchida and Mark Steinberg shows why Einstein liked playing Mozart so much. The opening sonata has a slow movement that can only have come from the Salzburg prodigy. The piano is recorded in a nice ambience and set appropriately back in the reverberant acoustic. It doesn’t sound like your head is buried in the bowels of the soundbox, as engineers often like to do. On the big SL’s, there’s a nice sense of balance between the two instruments. Reproducing a violin is devilishly hard. Most moving coil dynamic speakers make an utter mess of a violin, with the metallic tweeter’s oil can resonance projecting a hyper brilliant sound. Here we have the violin sounding as it does in a concert hall. Mozart always takes your breath away with the purity of his compositions. Unlike his often bawdy operas, his chamber music is where he retreated to his private self, saving his best ideas for this more intellectual medium.

 

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In Violin Sonata No 21 in E minor, K. 304, Mozart introduces a musical phrase in the opening Allegro of such beauty and depth that it takes you into an ethereal world. He returns to this phrase with a subtle shift of key in the second and final minuet movement. How did he write such music? It’s a disc you can’t stop listening to once you hear it. I was fortunate to live in Western Massachusetts for a good many years where Mitsuko Uchida runs a chamber music series in nearby Vermont. Many happy memories from attending some of those concerts. This Philips SACD is superb.

 

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It’s interesting how orchestras get tied into the sound of their home venues. Unfortunately not all concert halls have great sound. The New York Philharmonic moved to a new concert hall in Lincoln Center in 1962, and from the opening night, it was clear that the hall was an acoustical disaster.

As the New York Times wrote two years ago after another half a billion dollars spent to fix the hall of the infamous opening night:

A Notoriously Jinxed Concert Hall Is Reborn, Again (Published 2022)

David Geffen Hall, the New York Philharmonic’s Lincoln Center home, is reopening after a $550 million renovation aimed at breaking its acoustic curse — and adding a dash of glamour.

www.nytimes.com

‘That first evening, patrons — Jackie Kennedy, Nelson Rockefeller, Dean Rusk and Adlai Stevenson among them — mounted escalators to an auditorium that was a symphony in deep blue and gold, with swooping balconies. Leonard Bernstein, classical music’s answer to the Beatles, strode onstage. The New York Philharmonic exploded with the first exultant notes of “Gloria” from Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis.”
And everyone with ears instantly realized that the new hall was a disaster.

Musicians couldn’t hear each other. Listeners couldn’t hear the violas and cellos. Trumpets, trombones and clarinets echoed like yodelers in the Alps. Bernstein later described an “acoustical-psychological” effect: in such an extremely big, long hall, where nearly a third of the audience was more than 100 feet from the stage, the orchestra, which doesn’t use amplification, sounded distant because it appeared as if “through the wrong end of a telescope.”
“Tear the place down and start over again,” was George Szell’s verdict after conducting the Cleveland Orchestra there.”

Well, I won’t judge whether the newly restored hall is improved since I haven't heard it, but I went to quite a few concerts in the old hall and it’s so much worse than Carnegie Hall (Harry Pearson once railed in TAS that Carnegie’s own restoration project had ruined its legendary sound).

The current album I’m going to mention next is by a British Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, which has suffered a similar fate. The Barbican is simply put not a very good concert hall. I heard the Los Angeles Philharmonic play Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony there a few years back under the baton of Gustavo Dudamel, and it was a bit bright sounding. This live recording of Dvorak’s Sixth Symphony by Colin Davis and the LSO in DSD was engineered to try to minimize the hall’s weaknesses by a rather remote positioning of microphones, producing a bit of a muffled sound. The pianissimos are lost in the reverberance and the brass does still sound a bit bright. But the music is gorgeous and Davis is a great conductor. On the big SL’s, there’s a pleasing depth to the image and if you live with the reduced dynamics, there’s much to enjoy here.

 

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This is one of the most beautiful vocal recordings I have heard performed by the Boston Camerata with the Shaker singers. The music is simple and heartfelt. The recording is par excellence. A group of men (left channel) and women (right channel) with occasional soloists in the center or to one side. This recording, which comes off exemplary on the big SL’s, tells you so much about the colorations in your loudspeakers. Nothing beats voices as an acid test if a loudspeaker. Most audiophile speakers fail completely at this apparently simple task.

Boston Camerata's Recordings

 

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Naxos became a celebrated label in classical music by offering a wide range of music at significantly lower prices. Their secret sauce was to record with second tier orchestras that often produced results that challenged the best albums by premier ensembles. Here we have a delightful examine of Delius’ music with not one of Britain’s most famous orchestras, but the results are still enchanting. The recording is warm, full/balanced and set in a nice ambience. Delius wrote lovely music that’s never grating to the ear. He took his inspiration from nature often, as in many of these pieces. Lovely music that sounds splendid on the big SL’s.

 

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Here’s a lovely string quartet recording that I first discovered in an Audio Research dealer’s shop in Detroit. I’ve been listening to this album for almost 30 years on many systems. It’s a set of Chinese folk songs okayed impeccably well by the Shanghai string quartet. Recorded closely by a Delos engineer, it’s highly revealing of a loudspeaker midrange. Here on the big SL’s, it sounds exceptionally sweet and melodic, as good or better than I’ve heard it ever sound. Not a hint of brightness of the strings, which are so closely recorded that you feel like you are sitting next to them. Lively music combing oriented melodies with a western string quartet medium of expression. East meets West in the best musical sense. Highly recommended.

 

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Here is a legendary recording of Schubert’s Arpeggione sonata played by pianist and composer
Benjamin Britten and cellist Msistlav Rostropovich. Rightly reissued on Decca’s legendary recordings series, it’s a tour-de-force performance of a beautiful piece that coukd injy have come from the lyrical mind of Schubert. On the big SL’s, the slight harshness of the analog remastering is greatly reduced allowing one to enjoy the music. I personally prefer the original vinyl album to its digital remastering. As is so often digital remastering seems to brighten the analog textures. But the music is spellbinding. And the SL’s capture the sweep of Rostropovich’s majestic cello.

 

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Time for some lovely organ music, courtesy of the late lamented Dorian label from whom many fine recordings emanated. Jean Guillou made many fine organ albums for them. This album is of Cesar Franck’s organ music. On the big SL’s, there’s plenty of really deep bass coupled with a spatiality that’s very suitable. The ambience of the church comes through in spades. Franck’s music for organ was quieter and more introspective than Bach. There’s none of the oomph in some of Bach’s organ music. This is more intellectual and I enjoyed listening to this album. It’s beautifully recorded much like all the other Dorian albums. Electrostatic bass is very different from subwoofer bass. It’s not a one note bass. It has real texture to it. One of a piece with the rest of the spectrum. No crossover to muddy the sound.

 

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Another magnificent Harmonia Mundi recording from the 12-voice early music group Stile Antico of Victoria’s Easter music, first published on 1585. The purity of the voices is simply stunning on the big SL’s. The recording is a bit close, and you get the feeling of sitting in the first few rows at one of their concerts. The voices are projected out of the panels. Beautiful music and a highly recommended album to test your loudspeakers on.

 

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Johann Nepomuk Hummel was a child prodigy who was so good that he was taught for two years by none other than Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He stayed at Mozart’s house during this time. He was a brilliant composer who as his bad luck would have it overlapped with Ludwig Van Beethoven. Hummel composed many fabulous pieces including two beautiful piano concertos. Here we have his septets, played brilliantly by the legendary Nash ensemble. I played the original analog CRD LP so many times that I lost count. This digital remastering is not as good as the vinyl but shows the remarkable atmospheric recording yk it’s best advantage on the big SL’s. For once, the piano is not spotlit, but recorded as you hear it in a concert.

 

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Chopin dedicated his life to one instrument, the piano, pouring into it his most celebrated ideas. Here we have a 2021 high res recording of his beautiful Nocturnes. Perfect for late night listening. These are quiet pieces and do not display the bravura qualities of his more showy pieces like his Etudes. The DG recording is as usual too closely miked and your head feels like it’s buried inside the piano. But the big SL’s take this in stride and there is much to enjoy here. Many famous pianists have recorded the Nocturnes, from Rubinstein to Barenboim. Here we have a young Polish pianist who seems destined for greater things. He doesn’t get as deep into the music as his illustrious predecessors but give him a few more years to mature.