Music and Recording Features

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Music and Recording FeaturesNews
Classic Arturo Delmoni Gold CD Available Again
Wes Phillips  |  Dec 27, 2009  |  0 comments
Back when there was still something called the "classical music industry," one of Stereophile's favorite small labels was John Marks Records, masterminded by the magazine's "The Fifth Element" columnist, John Marks. In fact, it was his recordings that first brought John to the magazine's attention. JMR had a phenomenal run of releases, among them Arturo Delmoni and Meg Bachman Vas's Songs My Mother Taught Me, Nathaniel Rosen's cycle of J.S. Bach's Suites for Solo Cello, Delmoni and Rosen's Music for a Glass Bead Game, and the three Rejoice recordings of Christmas music for string quartet (also featuring Delmoni and Rosen). That's a pretty solid run for a label that released fewer than 20 recordings.
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Music and Recording FeaturesArt Dudley Listening
Listening #81
Art Dudley  |  Sep 29, 2009  |  1 comments
For an artform in which sound is everything, popular music has been blessed with strangely little poetry: There may be no other genre where high-mindedness falls with such a thud. Leonard Cohen remains the most striking exception, not just for the genuine seriousness of his music or the adulation of his audience, but for the ability of the former to survive the latter.
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Music and Recording Features
Live at Otto's: a New Stereophile Jazz CD
John Atkinson  |  Jun 26, 2009  |  0 comments
Released in July, Live at Otto's Shrunken Head (STPH020-2) is the latest Stereophile CD from reviewer Bob Reina's jazz quartet, Attention Screen. Unlike the group's first CD, Live at Merkin Hall (STPH018-2, released in 2007), which was recorded with multiple microphones, I captured the eight improvisations on Live at Otto's using a single pair of mikes.
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Music and Recording Features
New Cantus CD Features Luminous Sound
John Atkinson  |  Jun 26, 2009  |  First Published: Sep 26, 2008  |  0 comments
In June 2007, I again recorded Minnesotan male choir Cantus live on location, this time in the glorious acoustic of Sauder Concert Hall at Goshen College, in Goshen, Indiana. The resultant CD, While You Are Alive (Cantus CTS-1208), is the eighth I have engineered of the group; it is a collection of 20th- and 21st-century works that explores, illuminates, and celebrates all stages of life, from birth to death.
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Music and Recording Features
A Must-Have Rachmaninoff CD
Stereophile Staff  |  Jun 26, 2009  |  First Published: Feb 26, 2008  |  0 comments
It starts quietly enough, with a simple falling-fifth motif, but the first movement of Sergei Rachmaninoff's neglected Piano Sonata 1 develops into a work of epic proportions nearly 40 minutes in length, with haunting melodies, massive dynamic contrasts, and lush, sensual harmonies.
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Music and Recording Features
New Cantus CD from John Atkinson
Stereophile Staff  |  Jun 26, 2009  |  First Published: Dec 26, 2007  |  0 comments
Stereophile's seventh CD of Minnesotan male choir Cantus, called with delightful originality Cantus (CTS1207) and recorded at 88.2kHz with 24-bit resolution, is now available from our e-commerce page, for $16.95 plus S&H.
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Stand Loudspeaker ReviewsThe Fifth ElementMusic and Recording Features
The Fifth Element #54
John Marks  |  Jun 19, 2009  |  0 comments
Back when there were bricks-and-mortar retail record stores to speak of in tenses other than past, I used to participate in new-release conferences. Retail-store buyers—the people who decided whether consumers would see your CDs as they browsed in the stores—would gather at a nice destination, such as Lake George, New York. The various labels would then make presentations about their upcoming new releases.
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Music and Recording Features
Zappa Returns!
John Swenson  |  Nov 22, 2008  |  0 comments
Frank Zappa was well known for a lot of things—his sharp satiric wit, his virtuoso guitar improvisations, his excellence as a bandleader, his fearlessness in combating hostile political forces and crooked record-industry executives. But Zappa is all too rarely given credit for his status as one of the most creative musical imaginations of the 20th century, regardless of genre.
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Music and Recording FeaturesArt Dudley Listening
Listening #70
Art Dudley  |  Oct 17, 2008  |  0 comments
Stereo Review, the world's most popular audio magazine during most of its time on Earth, was a common target of derision from the hobby's so-called high-end press, not least of all from me. We criticized its nerdy, boring prose, its uniformly positive reviews, and, most of all, its shameless pimping of the notions that measurements reveal all there is to know about a component, and that all competently engineered components sound equally fine.
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Music and Recording FeaturesArt Dudley Listening
Listening #68
Art Dudley  |  Aug 20, 2008  |  0 comments
Snobbery is a disease of the imagination.—Peter Straub, "Little Red's Tango"
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The Fifth ElementMusic and Recording FeaturesCD Player/Transport ReviewsBudget Component Reviews
The Fifth Element #47
John Marks  |  May 01, 2008  |  First Published: Apr 01, 2008  |  0 comments
US composer Morten Lauridsen's Lux Aeterna is one of the indisputable masterpieces of the 20th century. John Atkinson has recorded the male vocal group Cantus's performances of Lauridsen's O Magnum Mysterium (on Comfort and Joy: Volume One, Cantus CTS-1204) and Ave Maria Dulcissima (on Cantus, Cantus CTS-1207). (And great recordings they are—one engineer chum thinks JA's Cantus recording of OMM is the single best-engineered choral recording he's ever heard.)
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The Fifth ElementMusic and Recording Features
The Fifth Element #46
John Marks  |  Feb 26, 2008  |  0 comments
Another gosh-darn write-in competition! Sorry! They're like peanuts (or Campari and tonics). It's almost impossible to stop at just one.
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Music and Recording FeaturesInterviews
Willie Nile: Places He Has Never Been
Robert Baird  |  Nov 02, 2007  |  First Published: May 02, 2006  |  0 comments
Before I even turn on the recorder, Willie Nile is telling me his theory of how the granite under Manhattan Island conducts electricity, which accounts for the perceptible charge that many people feel makes New York City so special. It's also what draws artists like flies, none more passionate than singer-songwriter Nile, who's personally contributed a few volts during his years in NYC.
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Music and Recording Features
Attention Screen: The Making of Live at Merkin Hall
John Atkinson, Wes Phillips  |  Aug 18, 2007  |  First Published: Sep 18, 2007  |  0 comments
John Atkinson: Making It Live
The e-mail from Stereophile reviewer Bob Reina was straightforward: "I want to make a demo of my new jazz group. I plan to record the session in my living room by getting my old four-channel Teac 3440 out of mothballs and sticking one or two mikes on each instrument. I'd like your view on which mikes would be most appropriate for the four instruments . . . "
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Music and Recording Features
The Final Word: Yo Yo Ma Live
Larry Archibald  |  Aug 14, 2007  |  First Published: Nov 14, 1992  |  0 comments
I sometimes do crazy things to experience live music. In my late teens I met a woman—a friend of a friend of my girlfriend—who was a flautist attending the Mannes School of Music in New York City. She was a classic New Yorker, from a classic New York family. Though apparently demure and retiring, she had fearlessly ridden the city subways since childhood, taking the Broadway line at any hour of day or night (her stop was Dyckman Street, above 200th). All of her parents' money and energy, such as it was, had gone into their daughter's musical career, and I was so inspired by this level of focus and devotion that I hitchhiked from Boston to New York and back in order to attend her first concert, a performance of the two Mozart flute concerti. My presence was remarked upon as the act of a true friend, but I was the beneficiary: It was a great concert, and a good start to a life of experiencing the "call" of live music.
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