Search - Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Ludwig van Beethoven, Christoph Willibald Gluck :: The Classical Harmonie

Delightful music winningly played and miserably recorded

Larry VanDeSande | Mason, Michigan United States | 03/20/2007

(3 out of 5 stars)

"Britain's Albion Ensemble has a winning concert on this Hyperion Helios CD that is quite frankly ruined by terrible recording technology. Never have I heard a DDD recording made as recently as 1998, like this one, where there were such faults with the sound.



The music itself is lively and engaging and the playing is wonderful. The Albion Ensemble has mixed popular harmoniemusik -- Hummel's Octet-Partita in E flat major, Beethoven's Octet Op. 103 and Rondino WoO 25 -- with less popular music by Hummel and Gluck to provide an interesting and lively entertainment for any lover of the harmoniemusik genre.



Of the less well-known items on the CD, Hummel's "Die Eselshaut" (or "The donkey's costume") is from a play that premiered in 1814; it is scored for octet and contrabassoon in five sections. Wenzel Sedlak, a clarinetist and kapellmeister of the Lichetenstein court from 1808-1812 and one of the most popular arrangers in the harmoniemusik period, did the arrangement for this music.



The other less well known item on the CD is Josef Triebensee's arrangement of Christoph Willibald von Gluck's opera suite from "Iphigenie en Tauride". Scored in 7 sections, the music dates from 1805 and replicates the opera's overture, a ballet, chorus and a number of arias. Triebensee was Sedlak's predecessor at the Lichtenstein court and is perhaps the most well known of all harmonie arrangers. His most popular arrangement is the 19 movements he composed from Mozart's "Don Giovanni".



The more well-known pieces by Beethoven and Hummel each have many available recordings on CD and in other media. This recording matches any of those in playing, zest and style. Kudos to the Albion Ensemble for such a wonderful concert! This CD is a very welcome issue for any lover of harmoniemusik and would be a five star selection if the recording was in any way modern.



However, the recording technology, or the transfer from original tape to CD, is awful. When I played this CD on my five-speaker system the only speaker that played anything was the center speaker, meaning everything at the highest and lowest end of the sound spectrum disappeared. When I tried it on SACD it played in stereo but the bassoon and contrabassoon could essentially not be heard. The CD sounded best when played in my car.



The only other experiences I've had like this are playing older mono recordings from the 1940s. It is a terrible shame that Hyperion, an English company known for outstanding artists and recording technology, released such a miserable issue using modern recording technique. The music is delightful and imaginately played here but you can't hear all of it, and what you can here is so homogenized it sounds like it was recorded in the early 1960s.



I also am disappointed the full accounting of tracks and timing is not placed on the back cover of the CD; it is available on the back cover of the booklet, which includes interesting and informative notes on the composers, compositions and the players. Hyperion could easily have transferred this to the back cover of the CD enabling listeners to follow along without taking out the booklet.



So, a mixed bag here -- great music and playing mated to an unacceptable recording and packaging that could have been better renders what could have been outstanding to an overall average grade. This package should have been a lot more listener (and buyer) friendly that it is.



The $12 list price (and real price of more like $7.50) ameliorates this to some extent but I've heard hundreds of $2 and $3 recordings that sound better than this one. If ever a release screamed for a remastering upgrade, this is it."