When I knew youtube I began by feeling happy at having so much music at my disposal. But things always change and I'm beginning to see I can change too. Here I am trying to listen to a passage from Carmina Burana, the number Ego sum abbas. First item, the singer's voice at top volume, then the orchestra barely audible. Second item, the tempo too fast and so in the Wafna's chords, if you do not mentally anticipate the sound of the choir in the chords, you do not hear it. But beyond this, for there are many good old recordings in youtube, and some new ones that deserve to be heard, I have discovered that they are all live recordings. And on second thought, it would be absurd to find studio recordings there. [However, there are many, if you know how to look.] This has diminished my initial enthusiasm. Finally, the vast majority of the material is new, and so we are stuck with the pervading modern tendency of ultra fast tempi in all fast movements (and ultra slow in slow ones).
I knew something had to be wrong for it was too good. And so, what to do? Go to the record shop and make a record by record filter work to finally find something aesthetically satisfactory? But that can be done by people who lives in London, or at some place hours from it. And I swap London with any civilized city. And the one who lives in the end of the world, and had to wait two years for Ricordi to bring the score of the Rite? Of course. There is Amazon. And how do I know beforehand if the recording will satisfy me? There are the specialized review magazines for that. Hummm... Either I find a critic who knows my tastes or let the critic mold them. I prefer the first, but it's an imposibility. A perfect cul de sac scenario.
However, there is something good. The good performances/recordings (The performance has to be good. It's fundamental. But if the recording is bad, you won't appreciate the former.) that have made it, in a tolerable state, up to the digital era, have now found a preservation medium that is like bronze and marble for the ancients, when they wanted to immortalize some words: extremely durable. This parallel with the ancients is perhaps reflected in the name of a well-known brand of digital media: Verbatim which, in its complete form, verbatim ac literatim, means word for word and letter for letter.
I knew something had to be wrong for it was too good. And so, what to do? Go to the record shop and make a record by record filter work to finally find something aesthetically satisfactory? But that can be done by people who lives in London, or at some place hours from it. And I swap London with any civilized city. And the one who lives in the end of the world, and had to wait two years for Ricordi to bring the score of the Rite? Of course. There is Amazon. And how do I know beforehand if the recording will satisfy me? There are the specialized review magazines for that. Hummm... Either I find a critic who knows my tastes or let the critic mold them. I prefer the first, but it's an imposibility. A perfect cul de sac scenario.
However, there is something good. The good performances/recordings (The performance has to be good. It's fundamental. But if the recording is bad, you won't appreciate the former.) that have made it, in a tolerable state, up to the digital era, have now found a preservation medium that is like bronze and marble for the ancients, when they wanted to immortalize some words: extremely durable. This parallel with the ancients is perhaps reflected in the name of a well-known brand of digital media: Verbatim which, in its complete form, verbatim ac literatim, means word for word and letter for letter.
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