Varviso's coming
It is with no small excitement that I am awaiting Amazon's delivery to me of the new Decca set, Wagner: The Great Operas from the Bayreuth Festival, which - despite the inapt and frankly inappropriate title - contains Silvio Varviso's 1974 Meistersinger. The set has received some really glowing praise from some quarters, and I am interested to hear it - and not the version available from under-documented ArkivMusic on demand service (I really would like to know what the source material is, what the digital transfer vector looks like, and more about the CD-R media before I get too happy about paying their prices).
Kempe's Ring. Varviso's Meistersinger. Good times.
posted by Patrick J. Smith @ 11:54:00 PM
10 comments
10 Comments:
Hi Patrick,
Just wanted to let you know that ArkivMusic is, slowly by surely, refurbishing the initial titles set up without liner notes as "production-on-demand" ArkivCDs. So Variso's Meistersinger on Philips will have full documentation in the not-too-distant future.
Enjoy the music!
Wende@ArkivMusic.com
That's a step in the right direction, but I would really like to know precisely how the on-demand titles are made. By that I mean, what did the initial rip from the first generation CD look like (e.g., was it straight WAV, did the record label send you a master digital file, so on), what the file burned looked like (WAV vs. MP3 vs. FLAC vs. what-have-you with bitrate a necessary piece of information), and what the CD-R's provenance is.
I know these are picky things, and, if you'd like, I can explain why they matter.
Of course, none of this deters me from spending my student's mite at Arkiv, from time to time.
I'm looking forward to this box, as well. At some point, I will want to do a proper study of Tristan and Parsifal; and I completely expect that that study will confirm my suspicion that we need a copy of each opera in our home library. So just to consider the cost of compact disc editions of those two operas, it cannot be any great distance from this box.
Cheers,
~Karl
Any full-price Parsifal will set you back about what you'll pay for this box. Levine's version isn't what I would call my reference version (i.e., Knappertsbusch '64 or Kubelík '80), but it's still good if you can adjust to his glacial tempi.
It's not a bad box, though I clearly want it for one reason and one reason alone.
I remember hearing it ages ago and was impressed by Varviso's conducting but the singers, not so much.
Well, knowing the cast, I'm not super surprised that they weren't impressive. I can't imagine Sotin discharging his duties better than anyone else.
Wait, this is a 33-CD box set, for around 70 bucks? Did I read this rightly?
This sounds like an amazing deal...whats the catch.
Please email-
Patrick writes:
Any full-price Parsifal will set you back about what you'll pay for this box. Levine's version isn't what I would call my reference version . . . but it's still good if you can adjust to his glacial tempi.
I figure that Parsifal is a pretty long-breathed experience in any event, so I may well not find it any interference, that Jimmy's tempi are on the slower side. And we have seen here in Boston that he can turn slower tempi to excellent account.
Cheers,
~Karl
Did you mean Böhm's Ring or were you writing about a new Kempe release?
See below for context.
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