Best Classical Music Blu-rays

December 20, 2022

Here's our somewhat scattershot list of the best classical music HDVDs, many with 96kHz/24-bit sound, no DVDitis, and grades of A+. If we have missed something that ought to be on this list, please speak up:

  1. Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 6 from NHK with the Berlin Philharmonic under Ozawa

  2. 💓 Mahler Symphony No. 1 from NHK with the Saito Kinen Orchestra under Ozawa

  3. 💓 Brahms Symphony No. 2 from NHK with the Saito Kinen Orchestra under Ozawa

  4. 💓 Schumann Piano Concerto and Bruckner Symphony 9 from NHK with the Concertgebouw Orchestra under Haitink

  5. Mozart Symphony 35 and Haydn Cello Concerto from NHK with Mito Chamber Orchestra under Ozawa

  6. Mendelssohn Piano Concerto No. 1 and Midsummer Night's Dream Music from NHK with Mito Chamber Orchestra under Ozawa

  7. 💓 Tango! from Challenge Records---Piazzolla tango nuevo by the Isabelle van Keulen Ensemble

  8. Winterreise from Challenge Records with tenor Prégardien and Gees on piano

  9. Mutter Live—The Club Album from DG.

  10. Mozart Chamber Music from AIX Records with the Dover Quartet + guest artists

  11. Ein Deutsches Requiem from Concorde with heartfelt playing by the Cleveland Symphony at Bruckner's home church, the gorgeous Stiftsbasilika Monastery in St. Florian, under the baton of local favorite son Franz Welser-Möst

  12. 💓 Vespro della beata vergine. It's the best choral work to come along in HDVD

  13. Nuit Erik Satie. All you really need to know about Satie

  14. Der Messias. Handel, Mozart, and Robert Wilson!

  15. Beethoven Compete String Quartets. This is a reprint of older box set that became a collector’s item

  16. 💓 Bildbeschreibung. Wild contemporary concert piece written for the Klangforum Wien by Polish composer and singer Agata Zubel

  17. In War and Peace. Profound recital by Joyce DiDonato and Il pomo d’Oro

  18. 💓 BACH: The Art of Life (Deluxe Edition). Daniil Trifonov performance of The Art of the Fugue and other works by members of the Bach clan. This is the only classical music Blu-ray we added to this list in 2022, but we pray it may be a sign that the record pubishers are finally going to turn their attention to making the high quality music Blu-rays we deserve.

Observations

We now have about 363 classical music titles reported on the website. It's shocking to see how few of them are on our "Best Classical Music List." Almost all of the classical music Blu-rays reported on this website (but not on the list above) were shot with HD TV cameras at live performances when producer could get the needed rights and was able to find places to park his gear. They were shot primarily for the DVD market because DVDs were still selling much better than the new Blu-ray discs.

Many of these performances and recordings on DVD were lackluster. Others probably were improvements over most or all prior recordings because even a DVD reveals a lot about a classical music performance that sound-alone recordings, no matter how good, cannot show.

Once the DVDs were published the producers would often also publish the exact same video and sound files in Blu-ray dress. Normally the picture quality was improved over the DVD and often the sound quality was also better.

But few of these republished DVD shoots have what we demand of our Blu-ray discs (which we call HDVDs) for showing in HD home theaters. Most of the republished Blu-rays are infected with DVDitis, a disease characterized by a great many short video clips of small parts of the ensemble being recorded. Classical music Blu-rays need to be shot mostly with long and large-scale views of the ensemble. A good DVD can't be a good HDVD when the ensemble is larger than a solo performer or a small chamber group. And few of the DVD-style recordings were made with 96kHz/24-bit sound sampling. Learn more about the DVDitis problem in our detailed special article.

So the vast majority of the 363 classical music titles reported on the website were already crippled and obsolete when first published in Blu-ray. Almost everything has to be shot again with HDVD in mind. Right now, it appears that Blu-ray and DVDs are enjoying roughly equal sales in the fine arts categories. So far the introduction of 4K and HDR has been disappointing.

A recent encouraging event was the new BACH: The Art of Life recordings by pianist Daniiel Trifonov by DG. The “Deluxe Edition” of this came out with a Blu-ray recorded with 96kHz/24-bit sound and published in 2K video. It was a very nice recording with no DVDitis. And there was no DVD video published at all for this music. This suggests that DVD in the fine-arts space has finally started to fade.

What should you do now? One suggestion would be to keep buying your music in CD or streaming form and broaden your knowledge by exploring the new HDVD opera, ballet, and theater titles (where the problem of DVDitis is much less acute). If you are really interested in classical music video, buy some of the discs on the list above. You can learn from them how to distinguish the good from the mediocre and the bad. Next consider classical music titles on our Alphalist with grades A or B, which means the less or no DVDitis. Finally, trying a few of the C graded titles can't exactly hurt you. We don't consider them good values, but you might.