Brahms Symphony No. 1 and Elgar Cello Concert in E Minor

Brahms Symphony No. 1 and Elgar Cello Concert in E Minor concert. Also includes the Prelude to Act III of Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Played and recorded in Oxford at the Sheldonian Theatre in 2010. This was the traditional Europa-Konzert performed on May 1 each year by the Berliner Philharmoniker in a different European city. Daniel Barenboim conducts. Alisa Weilerstein plays cello. Directed by Rhodri Huw; director of photography was Bernie Davis; edited by Geraint Pari Huws. Released in 2010, disc has 5.1 dts-HD Master Audio surround sound. For the Elgar concerto Grade: B+ For the Brahms Symphony No. 1 Grade: C+

Under a guest conductor, the Berlin Philharmonic flew to Oxford to rehearse one day (with an American soloist they had never met before) and then play a May Day concert at 10 a.m. the next day. The tiny Sheldonian Theatre, drowned with light from bare windows and echoes from bare walls, was packed with an audience sitting 8 feet away from the band. This was a beautiful occasion, and there is no faking how delighted the audience was.

But excessive light was a huge problem for the cameras. The video is over-exposed throughout, which results in odd color balance, poor color saturation, and a slightly bleached look. This is a deficiency in PQ which can't be escaped, but the recording crews deserve praise for dealing with the light problem as well as they did. SQ is pretty good by CD and DVD standards and maybe admirably good considering the circumstances.  The February 2011 Gramophone, on page 115, calls this a "glorious disc" in its "Super Audio Corner." That might be overdoing it. We have compared subject Oxford disc to the Brahms title from NHK, which was recorded in the Saito Kinen Orchestra home venue using the best of everything including 96kHz/24 bit sound sampling. The NHK SQ is substantial better than subject Oxford recording made away from home in a cramped venue under provisional circumstances. 

Wagner Meistersinger Prelude to Act III

Surely the Berlin Philharmonic can play Wagner as well as anyone, and the performance of this warm-up seemed fine to me. We have already discussed PQ and SQ. So now lets turn our attention to video content.

This is the first number on the program, so the first thing the video director and editor should do is give us several long 100% shots of the orchestra filling the whole frame. This is to help us get oriented to how the orchestra is organized and let us look for our favorite players. In other words, it gives us a chance to become part of the audience at the venue.  Alas, this doesn't happen. There is a great 100% shot available to the director. But we are not allowed to see it until 7:45, almost the end of this 8:30 piece.  Up to then we get a confusing succession of quick cuts from the conductor (12 cuts including 4 showing the backs of the players) to part sections of the band followed by lots of too-clever panning and zooming. Along the way we see the back of the concert-masters head and only 2 shots of complete sections. One suspects  the video director maybe never saw the score of the Prelude to Act III.

There are, however,  a couple of  relapses into good video, maybe by accident. At 1:54 we see the 7 violas in a beautiful, well-organized frame as they jump into the lead. At 6:16 there is a good multi-section shot of the trumpets, bones, tuba, and bassoons. We will not grade this short piece; let's just say this disc is off to a bad start.

Elgar Cello Concerto

A surprise at this concert was an unforgettable performance of the Elgar cello concerto with Alisa Weilerstein as soloist.

Barenboim was, of course, the husband of Jacqueline du Pré, herself born in Oxford, whose rendition of the Elgar concerto is among the most successful classical records of all time. So this was doubtless a momentous occasion for Alisa. Showing herself worthy of the challenge, Alisa provided a performance that might be, if such a thing be possible, today's HDVD successor to the du Pré recordings.

Although du Pré was British, she became in the United States an icon of the women's liberation movement. Films of du Pré show why this happened. When she played the Elgar, du Pré, a wiry, farm-girl type, didn't seemed to be thinking about the soldiers who died in World War I. No, she seemed to be thinking this: "OK all you guys who think it takes a man to play the cello, watch me kick butt and take away your jobs!" Alisa, soft, sensitive, heavy (diabetes), and vulnerable, does seem with her Elgar to have in mind all those missing privates, squads, platoons, companies, divisions, and armies. She's playing for them, not for us. In her refulgent red gown (which flatters her colors and figure), she looks at her most expressive like a women in one of those grandmaster paintings who, having refused to flee or recant, delivers herself to some sort of horrible martyrdom. The emotional impact of her performance is magnified by the startling beauty of the the Sheldonian itself, a jewelbox turned inside-out that is both Spartan and opulent.

With a performer as arresting as Alisa on the stand, it would be hard for the video director to ruin the whole segment. We get 89 cuts of Alisa, many long enough for us to take in all in and enjoy it. We also get 6 decent whole-orchestra shots (see 29:32 for the best one) and 10 fairly pleasant part-orchestra shots. There are 17 close-up shots of Barenboim. Normally,  this is more than enough conductor shots, but it is especially interesting to see Barenboim here because of his connection to du Pré and this concerto.

But the rest of the news is bad. In addition to the 17 good shots of Barenboim, there are no fewer than 20 shots of him made over the backs of the orchestra. As one who has attended many live performances and has purchased every classical music HDVD published so far, I make this observation: I am not interested in seeing video of the backs of performers. Nor do I much like long-distance shots showing tiny images of the fronts of conductors. Finally, there is almost no attention given in this video to the contribution of small and large sections of the orchestra. For example, see the shot of 4 violas at 10:51. Why not show all 7 violas? And once the frame is set up, why does the camera zoom in, when it should (if it's going to zoom at all) move out to let us see more? For more of this, see also 10:59 where we get a shot of 4 of the 8 cellos (followed by zooming in).

Now for a grade. Even with the PQ, SQ, and video content weaknesses noted, this Elgar recording is still an example of how a classical music performance in HDVD can better the mere experience of hearing it on CD or SACD. The best grade I can give this under our standards is a "B+." But the generosity of the orchestra, Alisa's personal beauty and enchanting performance, and the elegance of the Seldonian Theatre contribute to make this one of my favorite videos.

Brahms Symphony No. 1

In this piece there are many loud passages from most or all of the orchestra. These loud parts tend to sound a bit harsh. I also noticed that the pizzicato playing at 1:10:23 doesn't sound good. My guess is that the sound engineers had to sacrifice accuracy of recording soft passages to avoid too much distortion in the loud parts.

As to video content, this recording suffers from a split personality. It has some of the qualities of a real HDVD. But it's also partly a DVD pretending to be an HDVD.

See our standards for a symphony orchestra recording in HDVD. Briefly, the low resolution of a DVD forces the cameraman shooting a symphony to use close-up shots of the conductor and small groups of players, usually in a frantic road-runner race of rapid video cuts. But with the power of HDVD cameras, you can shoot the whole orchestra and the larger sections of the band in a way that closely represents what is really happening on the stage.

First let's mention the ways in which this video meets our standards for an HDVD. I count 26 decent whole-orchestra shots, 24 part-orchestra shots, and 17 multiple-section shots. This is the sort of video we like to see with a symphony recording. For examples, see 52:10, 54:31, and 1:04:38 (great whole-orchestra shots) and 1:02:28 (part-orchestra view shown several times).

But this is a long symphony with a lot of video cuts. So there's also plenty of opportunity to mess this up, which Huw, Davis, and Huws fail not to do. It's hard to believe, but there are 64 shots of the conductor over the backs of the players. The worst of the worst of these is (1:26:04) the grand conclusion of the symphony in fff tutti --- the orchestra almost blowing out the windows---showing only the backs of the players. Then there are 56 close ups of Barenboim from the front, which is too many even if he is one of the more interesting conductors to watch. There are 14 boring instrument-only shots. There is also a huge number of solo and partial-section clips playing ping-pond with Barenboim in all those conductor shots. Finally, something missing are shots of large sections as a whole, of which I count only 5 (for examples see  57:11 for a neat video of the violas taking the lead and 1:22:06 of the 12 first violins).

Now to a grade: all  the deficiencies in PQ, SQ, and video content noted would easily knock the grade for this segment to "C-." But thanks to the substantial number of whole and part-orchestra shots provided, I'll move the grade up to "C+."