By rikkisimm
06-Sep-2009

Perhaps just a little tinkering?  

More lovely old mono recordings on CD. The originals were astonishingly clear for their day and Boult lived entirely in the world of this music. The performance of the Scapino overture is wonderfully lively - full of character and exquisite finesse of phrasing and beauty of tone.

The recording, however, while extremely clear, seems to lack adequate frequency response in the bass and lower-middle registers, resulting in a very shrill and unpleasant treble bias, above and beyond anything the composer is likely to have required.

This is rather hard to understand, given Decca's obvious advances in recording technique at the time. Perhaps their monitors were bass-heavy, so they didn't notice? Or perhaps some instruments were just too far away from the microphone. At all events, I feel some careful remastering is called for on this track, one of my favourites. The LPO at its very best.
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