Classical Music Guides & Reviews

[Daverz]

Sales of classical music in recent years have been very low. I guess there is only so much in the genre, it's mostly been recorded multiple times, and it isn't easy to do anything really new.

It won't help sales any, but there still plenty of great music that's gone unrecorded or under-recorded.

 

[JJB70]

I'm an optimist, and think that classical recordings will evolve to meet the changed market. The days of global mega star conductor recording machines churning out endless new releases which would sell in big numbers and with big budget labels have I think gone. If for no other reason than the back catalogue imposes a limit on commercial potential as there are so many first class recordings already available. However, as we have seen in other genres, orchestras are returning to a narrower but perhaps stronger relationship with their enthusiasts, focusing more on live performance, selling recordings directly through their own labels etc. And in many ways I think that is a good thing, for example I think a lot of the criticism of Herbert von Karajan is unfair but I do think his dominance of recorded classical music for so many years was a bit stifling and became a bit unhealthy for classical music as a whole. Returning music to the concert hall and closer links with the music buying enthusiast is rather healthy I think.

 

[Kal Rubinson]

OK, now I have to look for Weber's Der Freischutz. Is the new Abbey Road out yet?

"Der Freischutz" is one of my personal favorites and I have several recordings of it. When a new one is released, I want to hear it.
"Abbey Road" is to be release in a day or two. I have an advance copy for a review comment I am preparing.

 

[Robin L]

"Der Freischutz" is one of my personal favorites and I have several recordings of it. When a new one is released, I want to hear it.
"Abbey Road" is to be release in a day or two. I have an advance copy for a review comment I am preparing.

When people speak of the "finite" nature of "classical" music, they indicate how little they know of music from the Renaissance or Baroque eras, how little "new" music they are aware of. Even dealing with the obvious, well known repertoire, I want a show of hands of all of those who listened to all 104 of Haydn's symphonies.

And you can't get much more "finite" than the umpteenth re-release of a title that already sold 31 million copies.

 

[Ron Texas]

"Der Freischutz" is one of my personal favorites and I have several recordings of it. When a new one is released, I want to hear it.
"Abbey Road" is to be release in a day or two. I have an advance copy for a review comment I am preparing.

Abbey Road is one of my all time favorites. After 50 years it still sounds new and original. Unfortunately, the Beatles lives have been tragic.

 

[MRC01]

I've been running a trial comparing Primephonic & Idagio. I have a review that is more detailed than others I've read online:
http://mclements.net/blogWP/index.php/2019/09/28/classical-music-streaming-primephonic-idagio/

I find both to be very good services. I might lean toward Primephonic for their gapless playback and slightly better coverage of early music. But I found their Android app always consumes 200 MB / hour when streaming, even when set to stream at lower rates, which makes it unusable until they fix this bug.

 

[MRC01]

FWIW, I ended up picking Idagio over Primephonic, mainly due to the bugs I had encountered with Primephonic. The worst thing about Idagio is their lack of gap-less playback. But they've already implemented gap-less on iOS and they're rolling it out soon for Android & Browser.

This more than answers my original question. When the marginal cost of the next new composer, piece or performer you listen to is zero, it fundamentally changes the listening and educational experience.

 

[amadeuswus]

FWIW, I ended up picking Idagio over Primephonic, mainly due to the bugs I had encountered with Primephonic. The worst thing about Idagio is their lack of gap-less playback. But they've already implemented gap-less on iOS and they're rolling it out soon for Android & Browser.

This more than answers my original question. When the marginal cost of the next new composer, piece or performer you listen to is zero, it fundamentally changes the listening and educational experience.

Hi MRC01

It's good to hear that you are happy with Idagio. I recently experienced a very different reason to be grateful for streaming. Just moved and my CDs and LPs are still in boxes. It would take a lot of work to get organized again. But I could easily listen to whatever's available though my service.

 

[rodtor]

The worst thing about Idagio is their lack of gap-less playback. But they've already implemented gap-less on iOS and they're rolling it out soon for Android & Browser.

It is nice to hear that Idago is making this change. I have also found the lack of gapless to be the main reservation I have about Idagio. I also wish I could stream it through BluOS, but there appears to be no immediate plans for this to change. For me, the search function is the most rewarding feature of Idagio.

 

[rodrigaj]

... they've already implemented gap-less on iOS and they're rolling it out soon for Android & Browser...

This caught my attention. Has the implementation on iOS been documented anywhere? I'm going to test it tonight with Airplay, but I would have thought Idagio would have made a big deal of this - it has been a consistent criticism of this streaming service

 

[REK2575]

Honestly, Spotify is in many ways an excellent streaming service for classical. Yes, I know that even on "Very High" quality streaming, Spotify does not give you CD-quality, to say nothing of SACD/high-res. But as someone who does subscribe to Qobuz (and formerly subscribed to Tidal), I have to admit I cannot easily distinguish between a high-res 24-bit recording streaming on Qobuz and an mp3 streaming of the same album on Spotify. I guess I'm willing to pay extra for Qobuz's high-res streaming for that 'peace of mind' that I'm getting the best streaming quality available. But if I had to stick solely to Spotify, I'd probably be perfectly happy.

What Spotify has to recommend itself is a very good, broad classical catalog. An excellent app w/ good user interface. Spotify's app is better than Qobuz or Tidal's. One of the things that drives me crazy on Qobuz is the inability to sort 'favorited' recordings by Composer. Spotify makes this relatively easy (even if it occasionally screws up due to lousy metadata).

I tried the 'built for classical' streaming services Idagio and Primephonic. This was about a year ago -- but I was not impressed by the classical catalogs of either. Much smaller than Spotify or Qobuz or Tidal. Also, not having gapless playback for classical -- opera particularly -- is a deal-breaker. I dropped Tidal when I started coming across streaming errors on some recordings -- check out Carlos Kleiber's Tristan und Isolde -- transitions between some tracks is botched -- also Sinopoli's DG recording of Salome.

I currently have subscriptions to Qobuz and Spotify. I like them both.

 

[MRC01]

I have noticed that just about everything I find on Primephonic or Idagio is also on Amazon, and maybe Spotify. But good luck finding it! The standard ID3 metadata has only 1 "artist". When the Chicago Symphony is playing the Brahms violin concerto with conductor Reiner and soloist Heifetz, who is the artist: Brahms? Chicago Symphony? Reiner? Heifetz? It's inconsistent - you'll find all 4 variations across different recordings. This breaks search. If you have a specific recording in mind, you can always find it on those other services. But this inconsistency makes it impossible to line up all the different performers or recordings of a work to compare. That's what is so useful about Primephonic & Idagio. They have reworked the metadata making it so much more efficient to learn about and listen to different performers & recordings, I'm willing to pay for that.

 

[rodrigaj]

Regarding Idagio and gapless playback. I looked up the version history and it looks like they have had gapless in iOS since April.

 

[Robin L]

I have noticed that just about everything I find on Primephonic or Idagio is also on Amazon, and maybe Spotify. But good luck finding it! The standard ID3 metadata has only 1 "artist". When the Chicago Symphony is playing the Brahms violin concerto with conductor Reiner and soloist Heifetz, who is the artist: Brahms? Chicago Symphony? Reiner? Heifetz? It's inconsistent - you'll find all 4 variations across different recordings. This breaks search. If you have a specific recording in mind, you can always find it on those other services. But this inconsistency makes it impossible to line up all the different performers or recordings of a work to compare. That's what is so useful about Primephonic & Idagio. They have reworked the metadata making it so much more efficient to learn about and listen to different performers & recordings, I'm willing to pay for that.

This is why I have a DAP. I still have about 1000 cds to suck into the computer. The 2000 already in there include at least 100 I have yet to hear. I get to control the metadata. When you've got 7 & 2/3 sets of Beethoven Symphonies [plus spare change], that helps a lot.

 

[MRC01]

Back in the 90s I made a RDBMS to track my recordings, audio equipment, reviews/listening sessions with ratings & notes. It's my own schema so I have separate fields for composer, performer, director, soloist, etc. All my recordings are in there, each with notes from several different listening sessions, each linked to the equipment I was using to listen at that time. It's interesting to read how my perception of the same pieces and recordings has changed over time, and how different equipment revealed different aspects of the music. Over the years I've maintained it with different interfaces. A few years ago I wrote a bunch of JSP pages for it, so it's accessible from my phone, tablet or computer while I'm listening. It helps me add a bit of discipline to my listening sessions.

However, that's only tracking what I've already listened to. The streaming services help me expand my musical experience.

 

[BobbyTimmons]

I recommend this book as it includes brief CD and performance recommendations for each composer (although they are not very indepth reviews, so it might be considered shallow by people who already know their way around). I don't really use anything else to guide what I buy, apart from online reviews though.

It's available second-hand very cheaply
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rough-Guide-Classical-Music-Guides/dp/1843532476

 

[Wombat]

A comprehensive guide to Classical recordings(up to around 2010):https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Penguin_Guide_to_Recorded_Classical_Music

I use a copy of one the Penguin Jazz versions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Penguin_Guide_to_Jazz

 

[MRC01]

Here's an update. I used Idagio for a few months and enjoyed it. Reliable with true CD sound quality. However, I was always getting occasional dropouts or "tics" in the sound. Recording it to test, they were little gaps of a few milliseconds. This was worse with Primephonic, which is why I had initially selected Idagio.

However, it turns out this was caused by the Pulseaudio server on the Linux PC I was using. Ubuntu 16.04 uses Pulseaudio 1.8, which uses timer-based scheduling for low latency. But it is a bit too aggressive at minimizing latency, which caused occasional dropouts. I reconfigured Pulseaudio to disable timer-based scheduling and gave it 100 ms of buffering (2 fragments, 50 ms each); for comparison, it defaults to 18 msec. This buffer increase completely eliminated the problem and I get perfectly smooth audio from both services, at all bit rates.

So, it turns out that this problem was worse with Primephonic only because while Idagio maxes out at 44-16, Primephonic streams the audio at higher rates (whatever the native rate of the album is; sometimes 44-16, but could be 88.2, 96, 176.4 or 192). The data was being transferred glitch-free over the network, but the higher audio rates put more load on the system buffering the audio, exacerbating any timing issues. After switching from timer-based to buffers, I can stream uncompressed 192-24 audio without any glitches. This increases latency to 100 ms which is an issue if you're a gamer, but I'm not so no worries. Furthermore, since Primephonic has gapless playback in the browser, and their catalog has slightly better coverage of early music, led me to switch from Idagio to Primephonic.

 

[Sashoir]

I listen to all kinds of classical and more generally acoustic music: from medieval, renaissance, baroque, classical, romantic. My interest fades around 1900 when this music stopped sounding like music to me (with a few exceptions like Rachmaninoff and to a lesser extent others like Shostakovich). I prefer small ensemble works. I've got a mix of some of the best historical performances from musicians like Heifetz, DuPre, Ashkenazy, and some modern versions like Florestan, Emerson, Belcea. For example I enjoy listening to first Berman (1963), then Gerstein (2015), play the Liszt etudes. Or whatever. I also listen to ancient and traditional music, anything from Hildegard of Bingen to Joel Fredericksen to Brian Kay or even the Chieftans. Also a variety of jazz, from old classics like Coltrane, Brubeck, etc. to modern like Diana Krall, Yuko Mabuchi and Fonnesbaek.

Anyway, I'm looking for guides & reviews to expand my collection. I don't think I'll ever like modern classical music, and I'm not even going to try. So it's more about discovering either (A) new composers or musicians in the genres I like, or (B) new modern performances of these pieces that have something new to say.

I've read Grammophon, Fanfare, BBC. They're OK but not really what I'm looking for. Either too narrowly focused, too snooty, or for whatever reason occasionally useful but overall just not my cup of tea. I also follow Stereophile's "Records to Die For" which has occasional gems. Any other recommendations? What publications do you subscribe to, or otherwise how do you discover new music and performances worth having?

BTW the title says "Classical" but this is open to pretty much any kind of acoustic or mostly acoustic music.

I don't know about finding *recordings* per se (I just use spotify or the label's website "preview" function to make a best guess before I buy the recording), but I myself have found three principal ways of discovering new material with a better than even chance of liking it, or at least being interested in it.

The first, and what used to be (for me) the easiest, was the "filler" works the record labels would put in to fill up the disc to 75 minutes or whatever it was for a compact disc. So you'd get, e.g. Smith's Symphony No. 2 as the "headline" work and Jones' Sinfonietta like the supporting act.

The second has been to find a younger (really just less prolific) performer I like, and listen to some of their other recordings. Obviously if you only really like Ashkenazy, then this is not going to narrow the field very much given he recorded everything ever written a bahzillion times. But it works for younger/less prolific performers. I know the label makes a lot of the recording decisions, but from what I can gather, the performer also has quite a bit of input.

The third is to follow links between composers/performers. For instance, if you liked someone who studied under Boulanger, maybe you'd like someone else who did? Or perhaps a composer you liked might have been a champion of someone else's music, or to have written about their music in their correspondence? For instance, Dave Brubeck might lead you via Millhaud to Pierre-Max Dubois. The great thing about the internet is you no longer need Grove's or something like that to trace out many of these connexions.

Another way which might be apposite for your tastes is to look at things like the Prix de Rome and other honours. Sure plenty of non-entities won, but some pretty good composers did, and many more entered but didn't win.

If you like *classical* classical music (like Telemann & al), then there was a wireless programme which surely must be on the internet somewhere, called "Adventures in music", by a gentleman called Karl Haas. I personally don't much enjoy music between about 1720 and 1850, and a fair bit of the music he played was of the sort "You'll all know this: it's attributed to the page-turner of the guy who Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach once met when having his carriage upholstery re-done after the great heatwave of 1763 but the autograph MS was lost in the early C19th". *BUT* his enthusiasm, knowledge, and happiness in sharing both meant I listened to the programme almost every day for over a decade (I moved then to a flat which didn't get FM very well).

All of the above go toward finding music by and for yourself. But it's also nice (if you can; it hasn't always been possible for me) to find new (new to you, not Stockhausen or even more avant garde stuff music with a friend with overlapping but not too similar tastes. When you listen to music together with someone, they learn your taste in ways that enable them to send you "off cuts" of things they themselves didn't like, but you might (and vice versa): that's how I found Jehan Alain, whom I really like. More importantly, you get the pleasure of discovering new things with someone else (even if that discovery is "God, this sounds like a bunch of boxers beating up a wind quintet!".

The problem I have with reviews, per se, is that we don't have a general vocabulary to describe things in a consistent way (which is how I discovered this forum). Music being completely abstract, this is understandable, but I find music reviews (from someone whose taste I don't know intimately) are like (but not as bad as) wine reviews. If I went out and was given a glass of wine that *actually* had "tobacco" or "petrol" overtones (a reasonably common description, at least 10-15 years ago), I'd punch the sommelier, sue the restaurant, and burn down the vineyard (and I used to smoke like Joan of Arc). I find it much easier in the case of music just to listen on the internet (I used to use the library listening room for similar purposes) and then stump up the cash after trying a few versions. For wine, I just stick with what I know 80% of the time, but missing out on a particular vintage from a particular winemaker is not the same kind of opportunity cost as never hearing the work of [Insert a second or third class/obscure composer whom you happen to really enjoy].

 

[MRC01]

... If you like *classical* classical music (like Telemann & al), then there was a wireless programme which surely must be on the internet somewhere, called "Adventures in music", by a gentleman called Karl Haas. ...

Another radio program that I really enjoyed was Saint Paul Sunday with Bill McGlaughlin. I listened for years and it introduced me to new music and performers. In this age of blogging the problem with opinions is everyone has one. Bill is the consummate curator, one of those rare professionals sharing educated, experienced opinions with a minimum of snobbery.

... The problem I have with reviews, per se, is that we don't have a general vocabulary to describe things in a consistent way (which is how I discovered this forum). Music being completely abstract, this is understandable, but I find music reviews (from someone whose taste I don't know intimately) are like (but not as bad as) wine reviews. ...

Exactly! I'm having a blast with my Idagio (now Primephonic) subscription. The marginal cost of trying the next performance, performer, composer, or music is zero. That's giving me more fun, exploring and learning with classical music than I've done in years.