John Williams in Vienna 'confirmed as the biggest classical best-seller of 2020, with 100,000 CD sales and 150 million streams'

[crumbs 8403]

22 minutes ago, InTheCity said:

the album version has endings with out applause, this tells you recordings were made ahead of time.

 

Uhhh, the clean endings came from either the rehearsals (which were likely recorded) or the pickup session which was done after one of the concerts. The actual performances are from the live concerts though.

 

Nothing you're "revealing" is some scandalous industry secret. This is commonplace with video productions of this nature.

[Holko 5370]

In this case we specifically know they held pickup sessions after one of the concerts where they recorded some clean openings and endings for the album. The rest are the actual live performances.

[InTheCity 55]

LMAO 

 

how else are they going to remove the applause in the tail of this? Izotope RX doesn't work like this.

I've also sat in the control room multiple nights and all rehersals of the berlin philharmonic recording Prokofiev 3 with Yuja wang 2 years ago - sat there and watched them compile the edits for the "live perfomance"  - but yeh go ahead and tell me more how I don't know what I'm talking about .  (I also was JW's proofreader on TFA.)

The man deserves DG best efforts, not this. Most of this stuff I'm picking up on my iphone 12 speakers - haven't even listend to it on my rig yet.   I assure you DG was aware of all of this and hit print anyway.  Shame On DG SHAME! 
seriously if you enjoy it enjoy it, I'm just pointing out some stuff I hear. 

 

Crumbs - buddy/friend - you just edited your post not once but twice - the initial post inferred I didn’t know what I was talking about.  Just sayin

 

glad mr Shark agreed with me 

[Fabulin 2483]

14 minutes ago, InTheCity said:

 (I also was JW's proofreader on TFA.)

Now that's interesting...

 

What does a proofreader do?

[Jurassic Shark 6328]

33 minutes ago, InTheCity said:

LMAO 

 

how else are they going to remove the applause in the tail of this? Izotope RX doesn't work like this.

I've also sat in the control room multiple nights and all rehersals of the berlin philharmonic recording Prokofiev 3 with Yuja wang 2 years ago - sat there and watched them compile the edits for the "live perfomance"  - but yeh go ahead and tell me more how I don't know what I'm talking about .  (I also was JW's proofreader on TFA.)

The man deserves DG best efforts, not this. Most of this stuff I'm picking up on my iphone 12 speakers - haven't even listend to it on my rig yet.   I assure you DG was aware of all of this and hit print anyway.  Shame On DG SHAME! 
seriously if you enjoy it enjoy it, I'm just pointing out some stuff I hear. 

 

Crumbs - buddy/friend - you just edited your post not once but twice - the initial post inferred I didn’t know what I was talking about.  Just sayin

 

glad mr Shark agreed with me 

 

FYI, some people on this forum are offended by critical appreciation.

[Score 483]

4 hours ago, InTheCity said:

36 sounds in ET the fourth horn plays a Bb instead of Bnatural, a written F#.It sounds completely alien to me but it may sound fine to you.

 

In my copy of the Signature Edition full score, the 4th horn has F natural, so Bb in real sounds, as played here. Of course, it is a huge error (one of the many affecting the Signature Edition scores), it should be F# as you say, but this explains how the mistake happened (if your copy has the correct note F#, maybe it is a later reprint). What it doesn't explain is how nobody noticed and corrected the wrong note at the rehearsals. It is not the first time that mistakes in the Signature Edition scores make their way to the performance.

[Marian Schedenig 3111]

6 hours ago, InTheCity said:

let me tell you a secret - no live concert album is ever live. I don't have the video version. the album version has endings with out applause, this tells you recordings were made ahead of time.
all rehersals are recorded too.

 

There was a short (30 minutes?) pickup session after the second concert to record clean beginnings and endings. The rehearsals weren't extensive and even if they were recorded probably wouldn't match the live performances. Except for a couple of clean beginnings and endings, this is fully live.

 

And while it would be nice to have those few spots cleaned up, I don't see how you can blame DG for that. They weren't producing a studio album, they were recording a live concert with a very limited time schedule. They couldn't have extended the pickup session after the concert because Williams was scheduled to meet a few people and then was already on his way back to the US. Plus I'm pretty sure the concerts were squeezed into an already fixed schedule at the Musikverein once Williams and the Philharmoniker found fitting dates. There were several other concerts at the Musikverein (including the Golden Hall, as far as I remember) on both dates. In all likelihood, the hall wasn't available for longer than they used it.

[Jurassic Shark 6328]

DG is certainly responsible for the engineering and the editing.

[Bespin 4303]

DG found the pot of gold!

 

A FOLLOW-UP, A FOLLOW-UP!

[Mr. Breathmask 458]

We've had one, yes. What about second concert?

[ATXHusker 619]

6 hours ago, InTheCity said:

I also was JW's proofreader on TFA.

 
Who is your proofreader then?  Capitalization at the beginning of sentences is always nice... 😂

[Leitmotif 8]

@Jurassic Shark & InTheCity

How could you enjoy anything? 

[InTheCity 55]

Shall I shut my ears?

Quote

 

King Arthur: “What else do the simple folk do—to perk up the heart when they’re blue?” Queen Guenevere: “They whistle.”

Churchill’s lifelong aversion to whistling is amusingly recounted by his bodyguard Walter Thompson in his 1953 book, Sixty Minutes with Winston Churchill. Approached near Downing Street by a young boy of about fifteen, hands in pockets and whistling loudly, Churchill called to him in a sharp, stern voice: “Stop that whistling!”

Looking up at the Prime Minister with utter unconcern, the youngster answered, “Why should I?”

“Because I don’t like it,” said Churchill, “and it’s a horrible noise.”

The boy strolled on, and then turned to call out: “Well, you can shut your ears, can’t you?” And he resumed whistling at full blast.

“Mr. Churchill was completely taken aback,” Thompson wrote, “and, for a moment, looked furious. Then, as we crossed the road into the Foreign Office yard, he began to smile. Quietly he repeated to himself the words, ‘You can shut your ears, can’t you?’ and followed them with one of his famous chuckles.”

 

 

[Leitmotif 8]

52 minutes ago, InTheCity said:

Shall I shut my ears?

 

Shall you turns on your emotional intelligence.
The perfect exists. But there is no perfect without errors.
Flubs, timing, tempo etc...They are scars on your kid.
But is your kid, so who cares his scars?
If is not your kid, why deal with it?

[InTheCity 55]

19 minutes ago, Leitmotif said:

Shall you turns on your emotional intelligence.
The perfect exists. But there is no perfect without errors.
Flubs, timing, tempo etc...They are scars on your kid.
But is your kid, so who cares his scars?
If is not your kid, why deal with it?

nice poem!

[aviazn 231]

Honestly, it seems there may simply have been too many flubs to catch them all. There's enough blame to go around — at the Vienna players, for their unfamiliarity with a lot of the music (if you've ever seen E.T., how does an entire section of violins accidentally launch into the climactic flying theme statement in cut time??), and at JW himself. It takes nothing away from his legacy to note that his powers as a conductor have diminished with age, and his steadiness in tempos has…relaxed.

 

We got what we got — a document of one of the world's great living composers at 88 years old parachuting in to conduct an orchestra he'd never worked with before on limited rehearsal and pickup time. The critiques don't take anything away from the historic nature of the occasion or the amazing live experience that people had there. And the same time, if we're to take Williams seriously as a composer, holding his recordings to the same standards as "serious" composers is fair game.

 

I just wish that orchestras like Vienna and Berlin had taken an interest in trying to establish a performing relationship with him earlier in his career. Given how pivotal his relationships with ensembles and individual performers have been to his choices in concert writing, it's tempting to think about what he might have written for one of those orchestras if he had become a regular guest artist starting even a decade ago.

[Jurassic Shark 6328]

12 hours ago, aviazn said:

And the same time, if we're to take Williams seriously as a composer, holding his recordings to the same standards as "serious" composers is fair game.

 

Exactly. Well put.

 

12 hours ago, aviazn said:

it's tempting to think about what he might have written for one of those orchestras if he had become a regular guest artist starting even a decade ago.

 

A decade? He could have started several decades ago, during or after his tenure with the Boston Pops. He sure had enough great music back then that they could have performed.

[Remco 470]

@aviaznThat’s very eloquently put.

 

As for DG, I’m starting to believe the ‘flub’ in SW main titles is actually an editing mistake. It sounds more like a bad crossfade maybe because some timing things had to align with the moving image?

[InTheCity 55]

Some really funky stuff going on in the low brass at et around 2:35

 

pic is terrible on et