Overrated Recordings
Tue, Mar 1 2011, 2:58PM
#2
RE: Overrated Recordings
I could not stand Goodall's conducting. ROH should have left him up in that small room and thrown away the key.
However, some of these posts suggest that his Wagner is so bad it's good, if you get my drift.
Hisw glorious work needs to be re-asssesssed!
I keep the Chandos sampler for my "mad doctor" collection, alongside Solti's final recording of the Bruckner 8th.
Thu, Mar 3 2011, 3:57PM
#3
RE: Overrated Recordings
Szell's set of the Schumann symphonies.
Initially compelling becoming even less so with repeated hearings especially when one knows he doctored the orchestration.
I know he is not alone in doing this but that neither justifies or excuses it.
Mon, Mar 14 2011, 2:00PM
#4
RE: Overrated Recordings
The comments regarding Karajan's Butterfly are completely unjustified.
This was my first ever Opera recording and as such was a revelation.
No other recording has come close to acheiving a beleivable sound like that in a great Opera house except all other Karajan opera recordings.
At last we can hear what the orchestra is doing which is vital to the drama and unless your equipment is faulty; then the singers are also supported in the most discreet and intuitive way by a superb conductor.
The recording never fails to move and amaze me.
For a totally over rated recording one has to look no further than Saint-Saens concertos played by Stephen Hough. The gold disc award!!!
He has made some superb recordings including a stupendous set of the concertos of Rachmaninoff.
But with Mendelssohn and Saint-Saens he is not your man.
Try any other recordings and you will find the charm these works require; totally missing from the rushed efforts we get here.
This from a pianist who recorded many piano albums full of charm!
Worse the recording denied a truly great recording of Vaughn-Williams original London Symphony conducted by Hickox that was truly worthy of the accolade.
A bad day for Gramophone; as bad as when the Academy Award for best actress was awarded to Grace Kelly instead of Judy Garland in 1954.
It reflected badly on the Academy then as that decision from Gramophone reflects badly on the magazine.
Mon, Mar 14 2011, 6:56PM
#5
RE: Overrated Recordings
Worse the recording denied a truly great recording of Vaughn-Williams original London Symphony conducted by Hickox that was truly worthy of the accolade.
It's also one of the best-sounding cds I've heard in years.
Tue, Mar 15 2011, 5:13PM
#6
RE: Overrated Recordings
As tagalie accused me of being somewhat grouchy the other day I'd better say what a great work is VW's London symphony. Much better than anything by that Austrian I complained about (with the possible exception of the latter's fourth symphony). It is good to hear the full original version on the deep rich sounding Hickox recording but it's pipped at the post as my favourite recording by two others, Barbirolli's 1957 Halle version (on Dutton) and Vernon Handley's CFP Liverpool recording. I cannot praise Handley's CFP recordings of our three greatest composers Elgar, VW & Delius too highly. The 1957 Barbirolli also sounds very good too irrespective of age: not so deep in the bass as the Hickox but a bit more bite, especially from the brass (listening on a system without tone controls).
Tue, Mar 15 2011, 5:20PM
#7
RE: Overrated Recordings
PS As to doik's comment on Stephen Hough's concerto recordings, from the excerpts I have heard (Gramophone CDs etc) I have just one remark: much too fast (and at leat one critic has said so too). His York Bowen solo works disc is very nicely done though.
Tue, Mar 15 2011, 7:58PM
#8
RE: Overrated Recordings
Long may you continue to stir-up hornets' nests, 33lp! This site needs such. About the only two threads to get people fired-up have been the Covermount cd and the JB7.
I do like the Hough Rachmaninov set, benefitting greatly from Litton's assistance. Litton's Rachmaninov symphony cycle was my favourite non-Russian effort.
Agreed, re. the Handley VW on cfp, especially the Sea Symphony, Pastoral and Antartica. At one time I had the Barbirolli London Sym. on lp - I think it was Pye wasn't it? - but it's gone awol. The Andrew Davis version was slammed by the critics but I find it a compelling, if slightly off-beat, reading with a ghostly, rather than exuberant, scherzo.
Wed, Mar 16 2011, 11:03AM
#9
RE: Overrated Recordings
Perhaps we should start an Under-rated recordings thread.
I agree that Handley's Antartica is something special.
However, back to the main purpose of the thread: Dudamel's Francesca da Rimini.
Far from being the heir to Stokowski's famous recording(s) it sags disastrously in the slower, more contemplative, music and the excitement whipped up by the conductor in the faster, and noisier, passages does not compensate.
Wed, Mar 30 2011, 7:52AM
#10
RE: Overrated Recordings
you are good man,thanks you ,if you want to play wow,please come to here.
Mon, Apr 4 2011, 2:50PM
#11
RE: Overrated Recordings
Here is some heresy from America, because I know how you love Beecham, but I have never been able to listen to his Boheme, regardless of Bjoerling, de los Angeles, et al. While many find it sympathetic to the singers, I find myself yelling "Get on with it!". And a lot of really bad ensemble.
It probably comes down to philosophy, but I learned Boheme with Toscanini. I would always rather hear someone with a clear idea of the sweep of a whole opera, rather than waiting for the soprano's high "C". I fight with people on this, but I consider opera to be a conductor's medium.
Tue, Apr 5 2011, 10:58AM
#12
RE: Overrated Recordings
Here is some heresy from America, because I know how you love Beecham, but I have never been able to listen to his Boheme, regardless of Bjoerling, de los Angeles, et al. While many find it sympathetic to the singers, I find myself yelling "Get on with it!". And a lot of really bad ensemble.
It probably comes down to philosophy, but I learned Boheme with Toscanini. I would always rather hear someone with a clear idea of the sweep of a whole opera, rather than waiting for the soprano's high "C". I fight with people on this, but I consider opera to be a conductor's medium.
Not among my favourites but if you want it as 'Hollywood musical' just for a change try Pappano.
I always thought that the Tebaldi/Serafin set, contemporaneous with the Beecham, was more like the real thing.
However, it's the Pappano I'll bring down from the shelf if I ever have the need to hear this to..-er- stuff again.
Fri, May 20 2011, 10:28PM
#13
RE: Overrated Recordings
I have to say I'm puzzled by the current high reputation of Keilberth"s Bayreuth "Ring". I vividly remember it being ruthlessly panned by the English critics of the 1950s when broadcast here on the Third - and I was actually getting to know it for the first time from those broadcasts at the time. (A few years later I mentioned to a friend who used to work for Beecham that I'd heard Modl do the immolation scene in concert in Baden - he threw up his hands in horror. "Don't" he said, with a pained expression on his face). And I heard Goodall conduct Walkure in Manchester in 1952, with the Konetzni sisters and Hans Beirer, supported by Edith Coates as Fricka and someone called Joan Sutherland among the Valkyries who had sung in Freischutz a couple of evenings before. At the time it seemed a long evening, and watching the Konetzni sisters, who had become very substantial figures, navigate round Leslie Hurry's sets in semi-darkness wasn't the most inspiring dramatic spectacle. So i gradually came to the conclusion that reputation was not to be trusted - and neither were critics. You had to keep an open mind. Later in the fifties Goodall, in that same Manchester pit, conducted an electrifying Tannhauser that gripped from the first climax in the overture through to the close. I even heard Keilberth conduct a very good Eroica with the BPO in Edinburgh (had Furtwangler lived I suppose it would have been him). And there was Keilberth's "Fliegende Hollander" too. And eventually I got to hear the Lehmann/Melchior/Walter Walkure Act I and realised how Wagner could be heard as bel canto , though that is not exactly what they were doing. But I would still like it explained how that savagely criticized 1950s Ring managed to metamorphose into a sought after and revered stereo CD issue. After all, ears are ears, and more than fifty years ago we heard the same singers singing the same things. Which generation got it right, and why?
Wed, May 25 2011, 7:33PM
#14
RE: Overrated Recordings
Very interesting (and amusing) post, Peter.
As for reviewers' whims, I recall two different Trevor Harvey reviews of the same recording, 15 months apart: the Svetlanov Borodin 2, once when it was first available of Melodiya, second time after it had been transferred to HMV.
Examples:
Melodiya issue - "I don't know if this is the Russian way of playing Borodin No. 2 or whether it is just Svetlanov's, but it's a highly effective way."
HMV - "It (comparing Sveltlanov's to the Varviso's version) may not be the utmost in the way of a stunning performance but it has none of the mistakes of judgement (for so they seem to me) that I find in Svetlanov's account."
Melodiya issue - "You will by this time be sure that Svetlanov spreads himself over the slow movement, making it wonderfully dreamy and atmospheric"
HMV - "but the Andante is really terribly slow and drawn-out. The opening clarinet phrase seems interminable, while the horn tune cannot flow ; nor, later, where the music needs to move on more lyrically, is Svetlanov really willing to let it do so"
Good old Trevor, God rest his soul. Over years of reading Gramophone and listening to him on the radio I came to realize his guidance was as dependable as that of an ouija board. Perhaps the key lesson is that readers need to get to know reviewers and decide which ones are closest to their own views and tastes.
Wed, May 25 2011, 8:24PM
#15
Overrated Recordings
I think one of the all-time overrated discs is that with Martha Argerich's 1965 Chopin recordings, regularly labelled "Legendary". Critics speak of her volcanic temperament, fiery pianism, etc., and it is volcanic indeed, but most of it of the wrong kind. Everything is rushed and overpedalled, the tone is banged, and the narrative element of the pieces completely lost. The Polonaise No. 6, in particular, coins the word "mess-tuosity". I really never could understand what all the fuss was about these registers, especially when Argerich herself has done better in later recordings of the same works.
I could not stand Goodall's conducting. ROH should have left him up in that small room and thrown away the key.
However, some of these posts suggest that his Wagner is so bad it's good, if you get my drift.
Hisw glorious work needs to be re-asssesssed!