Romy the Cat wrote:

The first one is Wand’s live recording with Berlin in 1999. It was Bruckner Seventh. I heard a few Wand’s Bruckner Seventh and I do not like any of them. This one from 1999 is the best Wand with Bruckner 7, however it does not rises to the pantheon of the greatest Bruckner 7. The sound of this recording is quite horrible. If it was not Wand’s Bruckner I would probably trash this CD, even I paid for it $40. Partially the sound is bad due to the idiots from BMG Japan re-master the recordings from original source in 192K. They use Sound Works K2, the industry leading tool and this crap destroys Sound like a nuclear bomb. It is unfortunate as this Wand’s Seventh is so bad…

What has happed did really happen?

Today I left a grocery store today, sat in a car, tuned to WCRB and discovered that they were playing the opining of the Mahler 3rd. I got instantly hypnotized how beautiful it was. It was slow enough and it was incredibly smart. It was expressive, it was meaningful, it was elegant and it was like never before. It had some second underlying super-meaning, so seldom happening with performance of Mahler 3rd.  It had almost that Stanislavsky super-task feeling and I was immediately taken with the play.

I quickly dove home which was just a mile away. The playback system was up and running and I spent next hour truly enjoying the performance. They never collapsed neither orchestra nor the conductor. The discipline of musicians was phenomenal but it was not constrained but superbly natural. It was like orchestra was breathing with Sound.  All six movements flew like a dream and it was absolutely gorgeous.  It was the best Mahler 3rd I heard and I eagerly was waiting the host to announce who it was.  It turned out that it was Semyon Bychkov leading the WDR Symphony Orchestra from 2002 with Marjana Lipovšek signing along with Köln Cathedral Choir.  It turned out that the performance is available on CD: Avie AV0019, not in US but this is kind of expected.

The event took place during the WCRB program by James David Jacobs, I have no idea how he dug it out! Thanks James!

All my searches of the CD were not successful but I was able to find it directly at the recording studio site:

http://www.avie-records.com/album_detail.php?id=91

Romy the Cat wrote:

This weekend it was 100s birthday of Günter Wand. I was not planning any “events” but the event did found me. Yesterday a local friend of my visited me. Me were listening some music and he brought some Japanese-made and not available otherwise DVDs with Bruckner recordings. One of them was Bruckner Symphony No. 4 with NDR Sinfonieorchester recorded during live concert. it was the original 1878 version and it was performed not anywhere but in the celebrated Lübeck cathedral with its renown 10 second reverberation time… I crank sound in my video room all the way up. The play phenomenal, the sound was phenomenal and the video presentation was not as annoying as usual. It was such a stunning presentation that as it was over I told to my friend that I am not willing to hear anything else today, he felt the same. I do not use my video room very frequently. I like the options but I am not sure that I like the entire video experience as much as I like my main playback room. Still, the Bruckner 4 yesterday was the single most inspiriting experience that I had from my video room so far. It was so powerful that I did not even had any interest to hear the yesterday neither live broadcast of BSO Richard Strauss’s “Also sprach Zarathustra” nor the last night’s live broadcast  of Verdi's 'Rigoletto' from Washington National Opera.

Last night I was returning from local production of Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta. It was mean rain here in Boston and fragile Bostonians were hiding in their homes, it was 10PM and the roads were free. I was in mood for some kind of offensive drive – a new car with new tires does stimulate to do it… I opened up the windows, max up the radio and for a next 30 minutes of driving from Brookline to Woburn I had absolutely phenomenal time. So, if you are residents of Brookline, Alston, Somerville, Arlington, Winchester and Woburn and your kids were waked up last night by a driving by Moron with loud radio then it was me.

If you remember the Solaris, not the American idiotic version but the Tarkovsky’s 1972?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcglyhUre4w