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Mine is a serious dip in pitch by at least a quarter tone. I wish it was a simple blend, but it's an electronic mishap...at least on mine. Bummer. Do record producers no longer listen to their final product before it goes to pressing? I'm sure this sort of thing could easily have been corrected.
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Good site re Gerhardt here: http://www.classicalcdreview.com/CGREBweb.html Given that he really entered the 'conductor' profession via recording studios, it's not so odd that public conducting never appealed to him. Privacy was an important thing to him, apparently. You could really say that he was THE epitome if a fine conductor, in that he regarded the composers and not the conductors as the true stars of the event. I've always been bemused by the slight pomposity of the career conductors (with numerous fine exceptions like Previn etc.) who expect equal gravitas of artistic kudos to the great composers they're representing ('interpreting'), or for that matter, even the skilled players they're marshalling. He certainly did very good things for the London orchestras, forming the freelance NPO, which is sadly no more as an ensemble. It was largely due to the greatly increased output of recordings that he engendered that this flexible membership orchestra needed birthing, since the other main London orchestras were all booked up. The NPO was comprised of players mainly from the LSO and RPO etc., in moonlighting mode. He may well also have concluded that as a recording conductor, live performances could not be perfectionistically controlled. He doesn't seem to have been overly narcissistic, a rarity in career conductors.
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...... There is still the problem of the unreleased music in RCA's vaults (?). "Between Two Worlds" was expanded to include the never-before released "Piano Rhapsody" (which was previously recorded for Readers' Digest and reissued by Varese). Stranger still is the expanded (13:21) suite from "The Fountainhead" which appeared on a cd released by - of all things - the U.S. Post Office to commemorate the release of a series of film composer stamps in 1999. WOW!! There was something I didn't know. The expanded "Fountainhead". I never bothered to pick up this CD. I didn't know there was anything special on it. My bad. Fortunately, SAE had a copy of it for sale, and I just picked it up. It also has Tiomkin's "The Thing". How odd. This makes me wonder if perhaps Gerhardt wasn't planning on expanding several of the CDs. There's the Korngold and Waxman, of course. He could easily have added "The Thing" to the Tiomkin disc, and the expanded "Fountainhead" could have made its' way to the Steiner CD. I may be way wrong, but wasn't this all happening at about the time RCA was being sold to BMG? If so, it could be that BMG dropped the boom on the whole project. As I've said a thousand times, no one can ever explain to me why record companies do the things they do.
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Is there any difference between the older editions of these albums and the reissues, particularly with Laura/Forever Amber/The Bad and the Beautiful? I'm looking to buy the Raksin album, but torn between getting the reissue, or sticking with the older release. I wasn't sure if the reissues included better sound or album notes.
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Thanks, SchiffyM. That's really good to know, as I only own the Herrmann and Korngold RCA recordings right now, and look forward to buying more from this series. I'll be going with the reissues.
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Do the reissues have better sound quality than the original CDs? Or is the quality pretty much the same? I have a few of the original ones, but if the reissues have better quality, I'd be willing to upgrade.
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