Holy Grail of recording

On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 meaning doesn't matter a jot, 10 meaning absolutely fundamentally important, my own rating would be:

* conductor/interpretation       10. I've lost count of the number of times I've dismissed a work then heard an interpretation that reveals it as a masterpiece.

* sound quality                       ranges from 2 to 8, depending on the composer and work. I've no problem with historical recordings of, say, Brahms or Beethoven, but to my ears most historical Mahler sounds deadly. Because it sits in a range that has long been within the capability of recording techniques, voice suffers less from poor recording than strings or percussion, for instance. One of my pet dislikes is unrealistic, close recording of soloists but many people seem to enjoy spotlit soloists and couldn't care less about what's going on elsewhere.

* historical context                 I'm tempted to say 0 unless you've got a vivid imagination. Or unless the occasion inspires orchestra and conductor.

* quality of orchestra              For those of us who don't claim any great facility with a musical instrument, probably a 3. But I know professional players who become apoplectic over poor playing and/or poor pitch. For them, orchestra quality makes or breaks a recording.

* audience response               Somewhere in the minuses for me, more often than not unless we're talking about opera, where it can be a plus or a minus, or it has a historical context (e.g. the performance than launches a future star). I find the Met audience, which applauds everything from scene changers to the guy who dims the lights, annoying. Then there are those idiots all over the world who love to drown out final diminuendoes. On the other hand the Teatro Carlo Felice audience in the dvd of Fille du Regiment is exactly in tune with what's happening on stage and in the pit, helping make this a memorable, one-off performance. In jazz concerts the audience is part of the show.

Audience response?

I have the Bayreuth/Keilberth/Testament Gotterdamerung where at a crucial point in the last Act some idiot coughs.

 First listen, OK, but subsequently I sit and wait in anticipation of this obvious smoker ruining it again.

Back to Solti, I think. He could get any orchestra to drown out any coughing and, yes, I know it's a studio recording.

I agree with most of your post, Tagalie, just to add that I am happy with a less than perfect recording, a Historic Performance, say, if I am familiar with the music.

But, that's virtual listening. If you purchase a product just to offer you the possibility to imagine how the work sounded, you pay for a "service" rather than the product itself.

The CD or SACD is a mere product and the first thing that matters for what you pay is whether the production values are as good as it gets. Of course, the production values themselves are not enough, but they can enhance and justify, in real terms (not by imagining or guessing), what happened in the studio or in the live performance.

I remember in almost all the "blind" listening tests, even experienced listeners chose the better recorded products rather than those where they had to "fill the gaps" with their minds. In quiet a few cases, because of the alteration of the original tone (timbre) of the instruments involved, even the most experienced could not recognise who was the player(s) or the orchestra involved.

Having said that, I don't mean we have to ignore the less impressive or realistic recordings, if we have to enjoy some by definition important performance or a great artist, conductor, etc. My perception of this exercise is that these kind of questions are artificial, at least to some extent. If we are collectors, we have to buy, for various reasons, a lot of recording products of different values and definitely not looking for any Holy Grail recording, because it doesn't exist.

Parla

The illusions of virtual listening, the tedious artificiality of hypothetical questions, the futile quest for a holy grail ................................

Hemlock, anyone?

Maybe, the question is whether you will take it. It depends on the reading.

In any case, my name is not Socrates. I trust you don't belong to the Democratic Senate either.

Parla

Exactly, which is what some of us have been saying.

If only all of us got the point.

I am off to enter the virtual world of opera (best place for it some would say!).

All recordings might be "virtual" only to the extent that cannot reproduce the exact live performance. However, the difference lies on how close the recording can be compared to this "live" (or studio) performance. We should not neglect that, except for the large scale works (Opera, Choral and Orchestral), the Chamber, Instrumental, Lied and small ensembles (vocal or instrumental) music can be reproduced to almost the actual levels of real performances.

The difference with the best possible recordings is that the ratio of how much you have to "imagine" with how much you actually listen is sometimes 85-90%, while, in mediocre or "historical" ones, it may go to the other way round. So, there is a difference, which, to some of us might be substantive.

Parla