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Walter's 1939 NBC Symphony Mahler First
Posted by Steve Luciani on May 13, 2024, 3:14 pm
In Lee Denhams's Mahler First survey, he gave Walter's performance a 9/10, in spite of slightly compromised sound. The good news is that recording has just been revisited by Restoration Archive, resulting in a completely fresh sounding reissue, to my ears.
I don't know if MusicWeb will ever review YouTube-posted restorations, but if ever one deserved such a review, it's this one, IMHO.
And @Lee, thanks so much for your survey, a true labor of love I refer to frequently.
The Bruno Walter live recording you reference is indeed remarkable for many reasons - so different to the later official recordings, either from New York with the Philharmonic's powerhouse brass in resplendent form, or the warmth and humane stereo remake with the Columbia Symphony, both equally fine and valid interpretations. Instead, with the NBC Symhony orchestra playing out of their skins, we are presented with a fiery interpretation of huge volatility. And yet this is the earliest existing recording of the work, performed by a conductor who knew the composer and probably witnessed Mahler conducting the symphony too .... maybe it's the truest reading of all to Mahler's intentions. Out of 250 recordings considered in the survey, this was probably the biggest surprise of all, along with Ernest Borsamky's in 1949 ("who?" you say - exactly:
So thank you for alerting us that the Walter/NBC is now in such good sound and agree that, sometimes, the transfers achieved by Youtube sonic wizards exceed that of the "professionals". I'm not sure if those type of transfers could be considered by music journals like MusicWeb Int as anything more than a footnote to a review (for example, Schmidt-Isserstedt's VPO Beethoven Symphony cycle sounds astonishing in its Youtube garb), but since you can also download these performances now via a subscription to the site, you never know ....
Previous Message
In Lee Denhams's Mahler First survey, he gave Walter's performance a 9/10, in spite of slightly compromised sound. The good news is that recording has just been revisited by Restoration Archive, resulting in a completely fresh sounding reissue, to my ears.
I don't know if MusicWeb will ever review YouTube-posted restorations, but if ever one deserved such a review, it's this one, IMHO.
And @Lee, thanks so much for your survey, a true labor of love I refer to frequently.
Thanks so much for the link to the Borsamsky Mahler 1. Really enjoyed the performance!
I don't know much about Restoration Archive's Paul Howard, except that he's a retired sound engineer who invented a technique he calls "Field Acoustic Restoration". It's apparently a work in progress, because he's gone back to some of his prior restorations, like the Walter Mahler first, with improved results.
There's a technical explanation of what he's doing that can be found in the 'More" of his 1940 Heifetz/Toscanini Beethoven Violin Concerto restoration:
"Every once in awhile we feel compelled to give our new listeners a brief primer on what we are listening to on this channel. What we are hearing is the real acoustics of monaural recordings made before the 1960s.
We do not hear in stereo. That is completely false.
Hearing is a complex metabolic process that utilizes the nervous system in one of the most interesting ways in which it interacts with its environment. What we actually hear is a temporal relationship with people and things in our atmosphere; we identify the locations of things around us by the physical presence of objects through atmospheric (acoustic) displacement. Humans are less aware of this because of the role vision plays in this process, but we can close our eyes and still identify the location of sounds around us with complete accuracy.
Microphones are just as sensitive to acoustic displacement as the human metabolic system. They are, in fact, based upon the same physics. Consequently, the principles used to make a stereo and mono recording in an acoustic environment are the same. The only difference is the presence of discreet panning. However, a monaural recording is acoustically identical to a stereo one.
On this channel we apply a process of using software to emulate the metabolic process to identify the acoustic displacement of discreet sound in the real time environment that is present in mono recordings. (It took almost twenty years to develop it.) This is then used to create a new mix based upon the original acoustics in a six-channel temporal matrix.
The result is not stereo, but something that can be more accurate and natural to listen to. The acoustic information we hear is the same as it was in the original recording environment. The true test of this is the sound itself.
A "Fake Stereo" signal is never true: it breaks down in headphones, and looks like exploding galaxies on test equipment, (You can't fool an oscilloscope.). This is because steering of selective sampling cannot represent acoustics of real time in synthetic stereo, or put them in phase.
In our process one can listen on headphones and determine quite clearly where everything in the original recording is located. On test equipment the signal looks exactly like a high-quality stereo recording.
The bottom line: everything you are listening to is actual acoustics: what the microphones actually picked up in real time."
Fascinating stuff, IMO.
If you haven't heard it, you might also enjoy listening to his restoration of Walter's historic Mahler 9th. With headphones on, I feel like I'm sitting in the Musikverein audience. The sound field is amazing. It's a performance that has grown on me. The more I hear it, the more 'right' it feels.
The Bruno Walter live recording you reference is indeed remarkable for many reasons - so different to the later official recordings, either from New York with the Philharmonic's powerhouse brass in resplendent form, or the warmth and humane stereo remake with the Columbia Symphony, both equally fine and valid interpretations. Instead, with the NBC Symhony orchestra playing out of their skins, we are presented with a fiery interpretation of huge volatility. And yet this is the earliest existing recording of the work, performed by a conductor who knew the composer and probably witnessed Mahler conducting the symphony too .... maybe it's the truest reading of all to Mahler's intentions. Out of 250 recordings considered in the survey, this was probably the biggest surprise of all, along with Ernest Borsamky's in 1949 ("who?" you say - exactly:
So thank you for alerting us that the Walter/NBC is now in such good sound and agree that, sometimes, the transfers achieved by Youtube sonic wizards exceed that of the "professionals". I'm not sure if those type of transfers could be considered by music journals like MusicWeb Int as anything more than a footnote to a review (for example, Schmidt-Isserstedt's VPO Beethoven Symphony cycle sounds astonishing in its Youtube garb), but since you can also download these performances now via a subscription to the site, you never know ....
Previous Message
In Lee Denhams's Mahler First survey, he gave Walter's performance a 9/10, in spite of slightly compromised sound. The good news is that recording has just been revisited by Restoration Archive, resulting in a completely fresh sounding reissue, to my ears.
I don't know if MusicWeb will ever review YouTube-posted restorations, but if ever one deserved such a review, it's this one, IMHO.
And @Lee, thanks so much for your survey, a true labor of love I refer to frequently.
Previous Message