Bruckner Symphony No. 9 and Schumann Piano Concerto
Bruckner Symphony No. 9 and Schumann Piano Concerto. Bernard Haitink conducts the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. Murray Perahia is the piano soloist. The title is the first effort by NHK to produce an HDVD of Western classical music with performers who have no special connection to Japan. The front cover is in English. But the rest of the disc is in Japanese. There are extras with persons speaking in English, but only Japanese subtitles are provided. So this disc is not aimed at the world market, but just for domestic consumption in Japan. This title has 5.0 PCM 96kHz/24 bit sound. Grade: A+ for both the Schumann Piano Concerto and the Bruckner Symphony No. 9.
Confrere William Alexander Huang and I have discussed this title a lot. We conclude it is probably the best classical music HDVD to be published so far an is one of the best classical music recordings ever published in any format. William has written a special article about this title with more about its importance. The rest of this mini review is based in part on the text that I wrote some time ago when I first watched this title.
Gramophon magazine says that the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra is the best in the world. Haitink was long the conductor there. He was succeeded a few years ago by Mariss Jansons. Haitink was invited back as guest conductor, so this was a sentimental event for everybody. The Gebouw itself also seemed to enjoy the evening by emitting its own mysterious aura. It's the most magnificent music venue I've seen. It has the same "shoebox" shape as the Vienna Großer Musikvereinssaal. But it is larger and grander even than the Vienna hall and appears consecrated, as if it were a church. It features staircases that emerge from the top of the back wall and fall sweeping past the huge organ through the performing stage to the conductor's podium. When the conductor and soloists descend these steps, you think of Judgement Day.
The Schumann concerto with Perahia provided a splendid warm up. The best seats in the house were occupied by a family with a seven-year old boy and his slightly older sister. The young man made it thru the Schumann almost without wiggling. After the intermission, the family was gone---wisely relieving the children from having to tackle the monumental Bruckner.
This was my first experience with Bruchner 9, and I start wiggling after 40 minutes. I went to the frig and got a beer. Thus braced, the Bruchner 9 kept growing on me. This work has long passages of extremely tricky fast music played by the huge band at just barely-audible pianissimo. The Concertgebouw folks handled all this with absolute precision and authority. The NHK sound engineers also recorded this with matching precision and clarity. Since this piece was dedicated to God, the brass sections (including a bunch of horn players switching to Wagner tubas) got their chance to offer up sounds audible in Heaven.
This is a beautiful HDVD of a special event played by great musicians in one of the world's top concert halls. This disc demonstrates convincingly that recording with 96kHz/24 bit sound sampling can produce better sound than what we have known before. And because this title was recorded to be shown on HDVD only (i.e. not in DVD format), the video content is superior to most that of most of the other HDVDs of classical music I have seen. This disc (and a few others from NHK) now provide us with a model against which all other classical music HDVDs may be judged.
Henry McFadyen Jr.
This Blu-ray HDVD received in 2012 an award in Japan from the Digital Entertainment Group for its sound recording. The DEG citation called this the "best [sound] recording ever released on music video."
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