LATEST ADDITIONS

I certainly am no stranger to the idea that a "student" orchestra can turn in a performance undeniably superior to those offered by many "professional" orchestras. After all, my favorite commercial recording of Mahler's Symphony 6 is by the orchestra of The Manhattan School of Music, conducted by Glenn Cortese.

But what a special treat it was to hear Daniel Barenboim conduct the orchestra he founded with Edward Said in Weimar in 1999, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, in a program of Beethoven's Second and Third ("Eroica") Symphonies at Providence's Veterans Memorial Auditorium on January 26. The concert was presented by the Cogut Center for the Humanities at Brown University. The communication between the conductor and the orchestra members, who obviously revere him, was a wonder to behold. Further, when the carefully-nurtured dynamics finally opened all the way up, the near-stunning sound was a rapturous feast of tactile tonal richness.

My advice: If you live in Big Apple-Land, do whatever it takes to hear Maestro Barenboim leading his young charges in all the Beethoven Symphonies at Carnegie Hall, January 30 to February 3.

We reported last November that Thiel Audio Products, the Kentucky-based speaker manufacturer founded by Kathy Gornik and the late Jim Thiel, had been had been acquired by a private equity firm based in Nashville, TN, and that Gornik was no longer with the company. At the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show, held January 8–11 in Las Vegas, the Thiel display at the Sands Convention Center was packed. I met up with Thiel's new CEO, 55-year old Bill Thomas, and asked him what had led him and his two partners to acquire the company.

At a time in history when the music business seems less interested in making anything of lasting value than in churning out disposable music—hits intended to be consumed for a few days via iPod, then left behind—the notion of cherishing the masterpieces, the records to die for, seems a lost art. Yet it's exactly that state of being—as when Lady Gaga's latest outfit commands a bigger spotlight than the recent Pink Floyd reissues—that makes our annual "Records To Die For" feature that much more essential.

Because it's rad.

I found this over at Mark Betcher's "Unearthed in the Atomic Attic" blog, where you can actually hear the album's entire second side. Fun stuff.

While we contemplate high-end audio’s long, slow, and stinking death, Magico, manufacturer of high-performance, high-priced loudspeakers, is in the mainstream press: USA Today ran an article earlier this week, which asked, “How much would you pay to bring music to life?”

Slowly, painfully, high-end audio seems to be dying. We all know it but we're apparently unable to resuscitate the patient. US dealers are closing at alarming rates—it must be the economy. Women continue to avoid the High End—it must be the technobabble combined with male equipment fetishism. Younger people aren't hopping aboard—it must be all those other things competing for their money. (Then again, it might be the High End's abhorrence of rock'n'roll.)

This reconstruction of the Ninth's Finale is the result of 30 years' work by Bruckner scholars Nicola Samale, John A. Phillips, Benjamin-Gunnar Cohrs, and Giuseppe Mazzuca (SPCM). (See March 2010 feature story.) For this new "Conclusive Revised Edition 2012," SPCM shortened by 18 bars the coda, of which little of Bruckner's writing survives, and reworked it to include, based on Bruckner's description, a development of the trumpets' "Alleluia" in bar five of the Adagio. This works well, though the coda now seems a bit short. A further "final" edition is in the works.