9 September 2020

Shostakovich BSO Koussevitzky - live

 





SHOSTAKOVICH


Symphony no. 9 (First american performance)

August 10, 1946


Symphony no. 5

March 16, 1948


Boston Symphony Orchestra

SERGEI KOUSSEVITZKY


FLAC (scans included)



6 comments:

Guido said...

http://www.mediafire.com/file/fhlry2r115sb5vu/DSCHKOU.zip/file

Dr. Ronald Carlson said...

Thank you very much Guido!!!

Sky Raven said...

Guido, Thank you so much for this treasure. This recording of the Shostakovich 9th was the American broadcast premier. Koussevitzky uses a much slower tempo for the second movement than we hear on his RCA recording of the 9th. Shostakovich disagreed with Koussevitzky's interpretation of that movement - - he thought it should be faster. RCA initially recorded the second movement as we hear it on this recording (much slower), but rerecorded it in April of 1947 to get it the way Shostakovich wanted it. So this is a real treasure to hear it the way Koussy initially interpreted it. Thanks so much... very appreciated. Burt

cyberclassic.com said...

Hello Guido.First my apologies for my imperfect Englisch, i am french. Thank you for the wunderfull and so offen hidden recordings. A real pleasure. I am addict off your work.
Merci beaucoup

Anonymous said...

I consider these great live performances by Koussevitzky, uploaded at various times on this blog, to be as important as any of the treasures in my collection. I had most of the AS-Disc original CDs but, sadly, over the years almost all have "bronzed" or "rotted" (the internal metal part being badly oxidized) so that they are unplayable; "Guido"'s uploads are most appreciated!

The original live performances, here, come from two sources. The Symphony No. 9 was taken down on acetates across the street from Boston Symphony Hall, using a direct line to the Muzak Company, which used the Hall during the week to record background music. Muzak's engineer surruptitiously took down many live night-time performances by SK and the Orchestra, on (for the time) high fidelity 33.3 rpm acetate disks: NO audio compression, direct from one very high quality microphone suspected high above the orchestra: so the balances you hear are closer to the conductor's concept than the RCA Victor records of the time, very much altered (particularly through audio limiters, changing the musical dynamics and the sonorities and character of "attacks".) Here, there are none of these spurious effects.

The Symphony No. 5 has been taken from the NBC radio network lines from a broadcast, with the most AWFUL audio limiting imaginable (which cannot be subtracted or alieviated.)

The original blog upload would not work right in VLC Media player (again, perhaps another FLAC file that is non-standard, so the cue file loses track of divisions.) I decided therefore to try to go "whole hog" and reprocess the whole thing. I did a mild bit of declicking first; the Sym 9 required only a few small adjustments and a normalization of level to 100%; it's close to the BEST sounding SK live artifact anywhere! Sym 5, however, is ABYSMAL. It has hollow, weak sound with virtually nothing below about 150 Hz. I re-EQ' it but all attempts to remove the boominess just made the shrieking upper mids more objectionable; there is no actual real signal above 5 k so adjustment of the entire upper mid, to put it in balance, just makes it sound duller. So I did a bit of work below 150 Hz and adjusted the levels somewhat. I intuit that sometime in the past, SOMEBODY has added a lot of echo to this, which doesn't help. And the echo effects are not helpful, given the severe reduction of dynamic range; just makes the loud parts seem jumbled. That was "AM radio network line sound" at the time; too bad it's not recorded closer to the source.

AS-Disc used a horrible, ineffective fake stereo (comb filtering, with an added overall R ch phase shift that causes a very BAD lossy and dull mix of L and R back to mono); so I used only the left channel and tried to put back the correct spectral balance of both recordings. Not ideal but the only practical solution without access to the source tapes before AS-Disc's inept processing. Since the cue file would not work right I split it into individual tracks according to the AS-Disc original edit. And, my FLACs are one-channel MONO saving data space. I've done a bit of tweaking to fit my own needs so if this is not to your taste, take the original files from Guido's folder.

I have zipped this into the following file, and uploaded it as a free *THIRTY DAY ONLY* availability from Zippyshare, here:
https://www23.zippyshare.com/v/XOwjKfnO/file.html (130 MB)

Of course, take care DL'ing from this outfit, ignoring their spam and fake website ads and "warnings", etc. With a heavy duty Ad-Blocker in your browser, you can usually zap this stuff and never see any of it; without one, you probably should never use any of these file-sharing sites, as sometimes they accompany what you WANT with garbage that MUST be ignored; not opened; not believed.

Thanks again to Guido for providing this valuable, rare, long-deleted disk!

8H Haggis

Sky Raven said...

8H Haggis,

Thank you so much for taking the time and effort to rework this disc. Your reprocess sounds wonderful. Upon re-listening to the AS-Disc version, it is now clear to me what a bad job they did. The reworked Sym 5 sounds like it should now, and sounds terrific. Much appreciated.

Burt