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In the Forum: Musical Discussions
In the Thread: Stay home with Bruckner
Post Subject: The Bavarian BruckneriansPosted by JJ Triode on: 8/5/2020
So I bought the Bruckner symphony collection by the Bavarian Radio (Bayerische Rundfunk) Orchestra. It was the least expensive set offered by HDTracks and I thought it would be interesting to hear how different conductors approach Bruckner. It has Maazel conducting B1 and B2 from 1999, Jansons doing B3, 4, 7 and 8 in 2005, 2008, 2007 and 2017 respectively, Haitink doing B5 and 6 in 2010 and 2017, and Blomstedt B9 (3 movements) in 2009. All are 48k/24 files, and I bought them in .aiff format as I use a Mac for audio files.
Here is the not so good news: B1, 2, 3, 7 and 9 are "remastered" files in this collection, I suspect from 44k/16.
I listened so far to B1 and B5. The remastered file of B1 is clean sounding but kind of sterile, harsh on loud treble passages, and lacks low-level ambient information. The "not remastered" B5 is smoother, richer and has more reverberant spatial information, all of which is nice (especially for this music) but still sounds a bit gray compared to the best download files I have heard (e.g. many downloads and real-time streams from the BSO website.)
Will I poke around for more editions of these symphonies? Probably not until I have at least gone through this collection and decided what Bruckner's music might mean for me. right now I still am not "getting him" but it is early and maybe this set is really not good enough of a rendition (of course maybe also my installation is not up to the job but I am not making any changes there.)Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site