Recordings – RCA Reissues

I’ve been very pleased to see the early stereo RCA recordings being re-released in modern digital format. All of them were made on high-quality tape, multichannel, supervised by the finest engineers around in those days. There was a lot of terrific sound on those tapes, although nobody got a chance to hear it because of the limitations of LPs, which required special equalization, and of course didn’t have quite the dynamic range of modern digital recordings.

I recently picked up some of the Reiner/Chicago Symphony recordings from the early to mid 1950s, including the Dvorak New World Symphony and the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra, Music for Strings Percussion and Celesta, and the Hungarian Sketches. They sound as though they had been recorded yesterday–and yet these are fifty-year-old recordings. Once in a while you pick up a bit of fiddling to compensate for playback deficiencies–in the last movement of the Bartok the brass suddenly drops down to an obviously lower volume level. But that’s small potatoes: what a treat to hear these old recordings! I also got the Munch/Boston Symphony recording of Tchaikovsky Pathetique, one of the earliest examples of stereo recording. Again it sounds as though they did it yesterday.

The situation reminds me of the recent technological advances in restoring Technicolor movies, by re-combining the original three strips with computer software that ensures perfect alignment (film tends to shrink over time and so the three strips won’t align at all well if you just put them back together). After a bit of digital restoration (to remove scratches or nicks or whatnot) the movie is revealed at a level of sharpness and brilliance that has probably never been seen before. What a treat to see something like “The Wizard of Oz” so gorgeously restored, or to see the lush velvet textures of the costumes in “The Adventures of Robin Hood” with Errol Flynn.

It’s another time of change, that’s for sure: the physical media like CDs are probably going to become obsolete in just a few years. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, to be sure. I just hope that the new distribution techniques will not dictate that so many recordings go out of print so quickly.

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