November 5 1927, to be exact, making this recording 98 years old (plus almost a week)!
And, since posting this in April of 2016, I realize now that I used the wrong bass turnover. Though recorded in 1927, this "circle" Victor Red Seal label places this pressing (at the earliest) in 1938. So, I've used the correct turnover of 500 Hz and a slight treble roll-off, and I think it sounds great. The original engineers did a fabulous job of microphone placement, and the overall audio detail is superb--keeping in mind that this is from 1927 and not, say, 1957. From my own collection.
Originally to be titled Mouvement Symphonique, this work was composed in 1923. Honegger conducted his own recording in 1930.
Originally to be titled Mouvement Symphonique, this work was composed in 1923. Honegger conducted his own recording in 1930.
According to DAHR, the "Continental Symphony Orchestra" was the Orchestre symphonique du Gramophone.
I love the way the orchestra speeds through Honegger's work, and flawlessly. And Arthur's almost-as-wonderful Rugby (Mouvement Symphonique No.2), and his Mouvement Symphonique No. 3 are pretty widely available on vinyl and CD.
DOWNLOAD: Pacific 231 (Arthur Honegger).zip
Continental Symphony Orchestra (the Orchestre symphonique du Gramophone), under the direction of Piero Coppola, 11/5/1927.
Lee
I love the way the orchestra speeds through Honegger's work, and flawlessly. And Arthur's almost-as-wonderful Rugby (Mouvement Symphonique No.2), and his Mouvement Symphonique No. 3 are pretty widely available on vinyl and CD.
DOWNLOAD: Pacific 231 (Arthur Honegger).zip
Continental Symphony Orchestra (the Orchestre symphonique du Gramophone), under the direction of Piero Coppola, 11/5/1927.
Lee
7 comments:
Awesome.! Thank you.
Jammy,
My pleasure!
This is one of my favorites. Thank you!
I'm catching up on your posts. Glad to see you've switched to FLAC. I'll be looking in more often now. Thanks again.
Larry,
Sure! And I hadn't realized how easy it was to switch to FLAC--that's the only reason I had held back. Oh, and once you get a few years back, most of my uploads were banned by my hosting site. So there are a lot of "dead" links. Sorry about that...
Dave Federman thanks you for this wonderful find. To be honest, I love this work so much I have yet to find significant fault with any recording of it that I have heard. But it is nice to know this masterpiece caught RCA's ear so early. I thought the conductor employed actual railroad sounds at the very beginning. By the way, the sonics are pretty impressive for such an early point in electrical recording. Coppola does a fabulous work of making sure this train gets up to full speed in no time at all. Last but not least, your remastering is to be commended.
Thank you! And it helped a lot when I finally kenned that, as a later issue of the 1927 recording, this would require a different frequency curve. A technicality that probably doesn't make as much difference as I imagine, but I'm a fussy audio person. (I just discovered that "audiologist" is a medical specialty, so I can't use that word.) Yes, it's wonderful that "231" found its way on disc so early in its lifetime (in the realm of an electrical recording, at least), meaning that many listeners were ready for such radical polytonality. Years back, I was certain that portions of this work qualified as a atonal, but the definition of atonality is so strict that ANY suggestion of a tonal center rules out atonality--and even if the tonal center is constantly changing. Still, even from the time of J.S. Bach, there were tactics for bypassing tonality--even something as simple as half-step-parallel diminished-7th chords, and because those chords are "built" on constant intervals. I sometimes think that the subverting of tonality was happening earlier than theorists would like to think. And I'm very pleased with my remastering job--surprised, even. Sometimes I hit the bullseye; sometimes not. Great to hear from you.
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