Innehållsförteckning för Buyer's Guide 2016 från Stereophile

Audiophiles are regularly accused of being interested in the gear first, and in music a distant second. Yes, we all love our audio systems, but owning such a system would be pretty pointless if we didn’t have music to play on it. Something that Stereophile’s reviewers have in common is that, no matter how expensive their audio systems, their collections of recorded music are worth more. So at the beginning of each of the last 25 years, this magazine has celebrated its love of music by publishing “Records to Die For” (R2D4), a list of the two albums every reviewer, whether of hardware or of software, could not bear the thought of leaving behind.1 For this special edition we have collected the past 10 years’ worth of record reviews featured…

Jazz has always been intimately connected to recording. In fact, the title of “first jazz band” was bestowed on The Original Dixieland Jass Band only after they’d recorded their version of “Livery Stable Blues” for Victor, in 1917. The record reportedly sold over a million copies, and served as a launching point for jazz as a new popular music. Jazz records became a chief American cultural export, and their proliferation created sudden demand for personal appearances by the musicians who’d recorded them. Despite this success, many jazz musicians shunned recording, fearing that other musicians would use them to steal their solos or emulate their styles. Others felt the opposite—that they could learn from each other via records, and no longer had to go on the road with someone to learn…

ROCK, POP, COUNTRY, & ALTERNATIVE JAZZ CLASSICAL ORCHESTRAL & FILM SOUNDTRACKS OPERA, CHORAL, & VOCAL CHAMBER & INSTRUMENTAL FOLK & WORLD ADAMS: HARMONIELEHRE, SHORT RIDE IN A FAST MACHINE Michael Tilson Thomas, San Francisco Symphony SFSmedia SFS 0053 (SACD/CD). 2012. Jack Vad, prod. DDD. TT: 47:09 John Adams’s spacious symphonic work Harmonielehre was written in the mid-1980s, and was premiered by the SFSO under Edo de Waart in 1985. Short Ride in a Fast Machine was premiered by the SFSO, under Tilson Thomas, the following year. The orchestra seems to own these pieces, and that’s all to the good—their commitment and virtuosity make this a triumphant recording. Adams’s motoric motifs underlie the drama of Harmonielehre and, of course, drive Fast Machine. I have not been an easy sell for the…

“With chamber music you can get people who work on the music for months, rehearsing it every day for a couple of hours, and if they get it in a different way than you do, which is entirely possible, it’s not as a result of anything other than their good musicianship.”—Nico Muhly While the beginnings of the string quartet remain murky, if not entirely lost to history, it’s thought that a cross-pollination of Italian and German music in the 17th century is responsible for the ensemble’s beginning, though often with a keyboard instead of a viola. By the early 18th century, the trio sonata was being adapted into the sonate a quattro (Italy) and sonates en quator (France). Through the compositions of C.P.E. Bach and Franz Joseph Haydn, the ensemble…

ROCK, POP, COUNTRY, & ALTERNATIVE JAZZ CLASSICAL ORCHESTRAL & FILM SOUNDTRACKS OPERA, CHORAL, & VOCAL CHAMBER & INSTRUMENTAL FOLK & WORLD AMADOU & MARIAM: 1990–1995: LE MEILLEUR DES ANNÉES MALIENNES Mariam, vocals; Amadou, guitar Because 3106072 (CD). 2006. Aliyu Adamu Maikano, prod.; Wilfrid Harpaille, eng. ADD? TT: 77:11 Amadou & Mariam are a blind husband-andwife guitar-and-voice team from Mali, a country that has come to prominence as the home of some of the best and most accessible music to emerge from the African continent (cf the collaborations by Ry Cooder and Ali Farka Toure). This CD, a compilation of early recordings, contains beautiful, touching music ranging from blues to happy dance tunes. The sound quality is very variable, the original productions having been distributed on cassette, but offers a directness…

By the time rock’n’roll came around, mono recording was well established, the stereo revolution was just around the corner— and even in the very earliest rock’n’roll records, manipulation of the sound was evident. While some performers preferred to overload microphones and amplifiers to get a raw sound that might vaguely approximate what you’d hear if you caught the band live in some sweaty joint, others began to use the studio to create an entirely new art form. In Elvis Presley’s recordings for Sun Records, for example, a reverb effect, what Sam Phillips called, “slapback,” is liberally slathered on the sound. The recording studio itself, and all that could be done there, became a ghostly but essential member of the band. Sounds and performances could be manipulated by musicians, producers, and…

ROCK, POP, COUNTRY, & ALTERNATIVE JAZZ CLASSICAL ORCHESTRAL & FILM SOUNDTRACKS OPERA, CHORAL, & VOCAL CHAMBER & INSTRUMENTAL FOLK & WORLD AMBROSE AKINMUSIRE: WHEN THE HEART EMERGES GLISTENING Ambrose Akinmusire, trumpet; Walter Smith III, tenor saxophone; Gerald Clayton, piano; Harish Raghavan, bass; Justin Brown, drums; with Jason Moran, Fender Rhodes Blue Note 70619 2 (CD). 2011. Ambrose Akinmusire, Jason Moran, prods.; Dave Darlington, eng. DDD? TT: 53:43 Ambrose Akinmusire is the most important artist to enter jazz in the new millennium. This is the record that started the buzz, recorded when he was 28. The opening track, “Confessions to My Unborn Daughter,” demonstrates trumpet chops in the general vicinity of Clifford Brown. But Akinmusire’s technique enables his wild imagination. His song forms and solos honor the jazz tradition by exploding…

In the history of sound recording, opera holds a very special place. Not only is the very first opera ever composed still regularly performed—Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, composed in 1607, while Shakespeare was still writing plays—but in 1880, listeners connected by early telephones turned opera into the first electronic home entertainment. The great marketer Thomas Edison indicated, in his 1888 patent caveat, that the purpose of movies would be the delivery of opera. Edison also made the first known recording of music: of George Frideric Handel’s Israel in Egypt, cut into a cylinder of yellow paraffin at London’s Crystal Palace, in 1888. From 1951 through 1974, US commercial networks showed live opera on television. Today, opera continues to push media technology, projecting 3D computer graphics onstage. And live opera in HD, with…

ROCK, POP, COUNTRY, & ALTERNATIVE JAZZ CLASSICAL ORCHESTRAL & FILM SOUNDTRACKS OPERA, CHORAL, & VOCAL CHAMBER & INSTRUMENTAL FOLK & WORLD APHEX TWIN: COMPUTER CONTROLLED ACOUSTIC INSTRUMENTS PT.2 Warp WAP375CD (CD). 2015. Richard D. James, prod., eng.; Beau Thomas, mastering. DDD? TT: 27:56 This is an inspired mish-mash of sampled acoustic instruments, mixed and deposited in a dizzying array of instrumentals. Strummed prepared piano, tricky wood/metal percussion and drum patterns, distant children’s voices, and CinemaScope soundstaging all coexist without clashing. “Computer Controlled” my ass—Richard D. James had his hands on the knobs, sculpting the sounds and textures of these electroacoustic pasteups to mindwarping effect. Every time you play this CD you hear more: Try it first through speakers, then with a decent pair of headphones—each track will reveal completely different…

ROCK, POP, COUNTRY, & ALTERNATIVE JAZZ CLASSICAL ORCHESTRAL & FILM SOUNDTRACKS OPERA, CHORAL, & VOCAL CHAMBER & INSTRUMENTAL FOLK & WORLD 20/20: 20/20 & LOOK OUT! Oglio 81581 (CD). 1979–80/1995. Earle Mankey, Richard Podolor, prods.; Bill Cooper, eng. AAD. TT: 74:22 There was an explosion of great music in the late 1970s that included hundreds of New Wave and power-pop bands. These were not the goofy hair-wavers of the ‘80s, but more in line with early Elvis Costello, Paul Collins’ Beat, and XTC— punchy, noisy pop songs that mashed the recent punk uprising with early-Beatles sensibilities. One of the greatest but least celebrated of these groups was 20/20. Part of the reason for the latter may be that after the release of 20/20 they quickly fell apart musically, and then…

The story of recording orchestral classical music can rightly begin with Leopold Stokowski, who became a pop-culture icon in the 1930s and ’40s, and popularized both classical music and, later, stereo recording. At a time when music was still being recorded acoustically, Stokowski began to experiment with orchestral seating arrangements, doubling parts, and even using baffles to get better recorded sound. Although often thought of as a master of bad taste in terms of repertoire, Stokowski, leading the Philadelphia Orchestra, was also the first conductor to record electronically, in 1925. Not compelled to follow what he called “black marks on white paper,” he rearranged parts and reimagined what he believed were composers’ original intentions, to get better recorded sound. In 1940, he was one of the first to record on…

ROCK, POP, COUNTRY, & ALTERNATIVE JAZZ CLASSICAL ORCHESTRAL & FILM SOUNDTRACKS OPERA, CHORAL, & VOCAL CHAMBER & INSTRUMENTAL FOLK & WORLD J.S. BACH: CANTATAS BWV 82 & 199 Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, mezzosoprano; Craig Smith, Orchestra of Emmanuel Music Nonesuch 79692-2 (CD). 2003. Martin Sauer, prod.; Philipp Nedel, Marc Donahue, engs. DDD. TT: 50:42 “Records To Die For”? So let’s talk about death. There may be no more sorrowful Bach cantata than BWV 82, “Ich habe genug” (I have enough), and no more grippingly sorrowful rendition than this. Lieberson recorded it knowing that she was dying of cancer, and though this deepens the poignancy, it’s her performance that rivets. She sings with a modern vibrato that I usually don’t like in Bach, but her voice is so angelic, and the emotion…

What is now collectively known as the blues—the most elemental and uniquely American of all folk musical forms—began in the deep South as a fusion of traditional African rhythms and European folk music, played on instruments from both traditions. The most common form of the blues is a repeating progression of chords in 4/4 time in a basic 12-bar framework that eventually works itself into a groove. Like jazz, blues performances are improvisatory, and had to be trimmed to fit onto records. Evolving from acoustic guitar players like Robert Johnson, Son House, and Skip James, who practiced their art in the Mississippi Delta, the blues spread to Texas, Louisiana, and the Carolinas before moving north after WWII. During this migration blues performers also adopted electric guitars, and bullet microphones for…