Mahler Symphony No. 9

Mahler Symphony No. 9 concert. Claudio Abbado conducts the Lucerne Festival Orchestra in 2010. Directed for TV by Michael Beyer; produced by Paul  Smaczny. Released 2011, disc has 5.1 dts-HD Master Audio sound. This is the first HDVD to have a "multi-angle conductor camera." When you turn this on (typically with the "Angle" button on the remote control), you just see the conductor---it's possible to listen to the entire symphony and only see what various players in the orchestra see of the conductor when not looking directly at their sheet music. Grade: C

Paul Smaczny left EuroArts and started the Accentus label. It appears he took with him the contract to publish the Mahler symphony concerts at the Lucerne Festival. The last EuroArts disc in this series was the Symphony No. 7. Subject title is the first for Accentus, and Accentus will probably publish the Abbado Symphony No. 8 [this prediction turned out to be true].  

This title made a splash. David Gutman in the June 2011 Gramophone praised the DVD lavishly and it got an award. But you get the impression that Gutman never saw the Blu-ray version. This makes you wonder what kind of equipment and credentials even the top record critics have. Subject title also got a "Diapason d'Or" award from Diapason magazine.

We disagree, however, with these glowing assessments. For a complete review from confrere William Alexander Huang, see his special article Too Close to Greatness. We think this Lucerne performance was fine and could have been made into a great "A+" HDVD title. But the sound, though well miked and mixed, was not recorded with 96kHz/24bit sampling technology. And the video content is obsolete because it does not follow best practice standards and violates Huang's Law. This law holds that a good HDVD shoot will, "Use the flexible power of the high-def camera to get a pleasant (not hyperactive) mixture of shots of solos, small groups, small sections, large sections, and even groups of sections as well as the whole orchestra---depending on what forces the composer commits at various places in the score." For a discussion of an HDVD that gets the video content (and sound) right, see Huang's special article An Introduction to Blu-ray.

The heart of the problem with subject disc (and many other similar titles) is what we sometimes call DVDitis. The industry is still shooting DVDs and then trying to use the material to have another HDVD profit center. You can't do this. Because DVD picture resolution is so low, you have to shoot the DVDs as a long daisy chain of close-ups. This doesn't allow the viewer to see what is happening in the large orchestra. With high-definition cameras, the video director can follow the composer's score as his shooting script and give the viewer comprehensive views of what the orchestra is doing (in addition to the close ups).

Update on Friday, February 24, 2012 at 11:12AM by Henry McFadyen Jr.

The International Classical Music Awards gave its 2012 nod to this title in the "DVD Performance" category. From our perspective, this is just another example of how little the recording industry understands about HDVD. Most of the folks in the industry are still thinking in DVD terms. You make a DVD and then maybe publish it also in Blu-ray to get some extra income from those with HDTVs. This misses the fact that HDVD is a far superior product to DVD. And an HDVD has to be shot differently from a DVD to get a good product. So the HDVD should be graded in a separate category, which the ICMA does not have.

Now maybe the DVD of the Lucerne Mahler S9 is in fact a wonderful product. (We have never seen the DVD.) That doesn't change the fact that this performance made a mediocre HDVD. So the ICMA award is irrelevant to us.

Update on Wednesday, April 25, 2012 at 4:26PM by Henry McFadyen Jr.

A  few days ago we got word that BBC Music Magazine gave its 2012 "Best DVD" award to this Mahler Symphony No. 9. This award is irrelevant to us because we are interested in the HDVD version, which we damned with faint praise.