What We’re Listening To. Vol.1

As reviewers, we use music that we enjoy to help us asses the quality of the gear that we get in for review. This new section is basically a place for Secrets reviewers to share some of the musical selections they are listening to, each month, with our readers and each other. The music source can be from CD, vinyl, streaming, Hi-Res Audio, Multi-channel audio, open-reel tape, whatever. And these selections aren’t meant to be formal music reviews insomuch that they are more just a snapshot of our listening habits month to month. Also, by sharing our choices, it might be a way for readers and ourselves to discover something new and exciting to listen to.

But “difficult listening” doesn’t even come close to describing this album; it is an experience, a happening, a vicarious experience, of some poor unfortunate soul’s descent into madness. It makes me feel like I’m locked in a dark isolation chamber, surrounded by electronic noise and hearing voices that may or may not originate in my own head. And to this day I cannot define what is happening during the piece “He Done It The Way He Done It – II,” but I’m fairly certain it involves a demon and grievous bodily harm. Listen to this in the dark at your own risk.

I believe the entire album redefines what pop music’s subject matter can be; when I first heard it I instantly recognized it as an album I had wanted to exist for a very long time but never knew existed.

This is a beautiful, quiet double-LP vinyl pressing of the album and it sounds gorgeous. But you can buy this in high-resolution digital format from Bandcamp; do yourself a favor and buy it today. John Grant is definitely someone to keep an eye on.

I listen to their Best Of album very often from my Qobuz streaming service. It really is something special. It is only available in 16/44.1 format streaming (no high res version), but that is good enough. My second favorite Van Halen song is “Dreams”, and it is also on this Best Of album, having been first released on their 5150 album in 1986.

I was unfamiliar not only with the composer, Alessandro Piccinini (1566 – 1638), but the musician, Monica Pustilnik as well. This is Baroque at its best.

The album is beautifully recorded and played. I inducted it into my Favorites folder after just two tracks.

I think they possibly just could have been used less. This band really hits hard and shows some real talent, I can’t wait to see what they do in 2020.

All sounded very clean and detailed with great imaging and ambiance.I used the Dolby Surround upmixer on my Anthem MRX-1120 and listened to it in 5.2.4 channels. Fun stuff to be absorbed by and great surround demo material to boot.

Well, the certainly did a bang-up job in 2001 because The Stranger in surround sounds positively fantastic!

Beautiful and tasteful surround mixing with exceptional clarity and dimension. I own various copies of this album, from my sister’s original well-worn LP to a couple of different CD releases and a stereo SACD from Mobile Fidelity. This surround mix of a long favorite album of mine blows all the other ones away. I know an Anniversary Edition of 52nd Street has been released and I hope Sony follows suit with multi-channel mixes of Glass Houses and the Nylon Curtain on their respective anniversaries.

It can be pricy to obtain from US sources. A specialist in rare 20th-century classical music CDs, in the US, is Records International.

They tend to have fair prices for material like this.

This is an early work. Herrmann stopped producing works for the concert hall when his film work ramped up. This is an example of a Great American Symphony. Nearly every American composer wrote at least one. The name is derived from the Great American Novel. As the saying goes, “they are like potato chips you cannot have just one.” I will be sighting many more of them in later columns.

This is absolute music. It is not film or radio background music. Many critics have disparaged the work by saying “it sounds like film music” but they are absolutely wrong. To me, the work is modeled on the Walton first symphony but the musical voice is mature Herrmann. A work of 1941, it is a dark pre-war symphony. However, like the Walton, the 4th movement takes an unexpected right turn.

Herrmann’s later recordings can be rather slow, likely related to his heart disease, but this recording does not show that. This symphony has another recording, long out of print, and the symphony deserves more, but this is close to the definitive interpretation. The National Philharmonic Orchestra is an orchestra that produces wonderful performances when sight-reading as this recording shows.

More on the work is found in a Wikipedia entry.

The CD transfer is excellent (the photo is my cut up LP I purchased as a kid). The recording does reveal some tape saturation evident as Herrmann pushed the orchestra to extremes on the LP and CD. I used to think it was cartridge mistracking.

Today the number of recordings of the early symphonies gets close to 20 with the New World at 200. Despite the abundance, many put this Kertesz version at the top. István Kertész (1929 –1973) died young in a swimming accident and is thus less known today but almost all his recording, not just the Dvořák, is still in the catalog. I was always anticipating the re-recording of the symphonies by Kertész, a live Cleveland Orchestra recording of the 6th symphony hinted at what was to come, and I still recall the announcement of his death on the radio as a little kid.

I spent much time defending this set with a high school teacher who was more fond of the newly released Kubelik, Berlin Philharmonic set. I still think this set is superior to that and almost everything else that has come since. Gramophone magazine agrees with me more than 40 years later when they wrote a piece entitled Top 15 Dvořák recordings

The number of CD re-issues of the Kertész Dvořák is vast (I have at least three different ones) but comparing those re-issues using the Audacity editing program shows they were all about the same exhibiting a huge bass roll-off. These downloads are different with extended bass and dynamics. This is a typical sounding 1960s London recording. The sound is better than the LP but far from what can be done with modern digital equipment and 21st-century microphones. You purchase this for the performance.

In the US, this was released on Blu-Ray which disappeared so fast that the box set is now $1000.00 if you can find it. Instead, get downloads from the site listed above. All the Kertész Dvořák recordings, which include many other works outside of the symphonies costs $77.00. You can do the downloads in smaller bunches but the total comes out higher. Get the whole thing and discover the many great works by this composer outside of symphonies 7 through 9.

This first BBB album is a good intro to the rest of the work by this band, that I also like. Although I enjoy some of their discs more than others, this first release is one of my two favorites, the other being “Blue Eyed Black Boy.”

Another favorite, despite its horrible content, and it’s less than stellar performance on this particular disc is “In the Deathcar.” The “Goran Bregovic Wedding and Funeral Band” is featured on many of these cuts. If you’re not familiar with this type of music, this is a fine introduction. It’ll grow on you…