Comparison Recordings:
Franck: Stokowski, Hilversum Radio SO
[ADD] Cala CACD 0525
Saint-Saëns: Munch, Boston SO RCA/BMG
60817-2 RG or JVC/BMG JMCXR-002
The Franck Symphony
is so rich a piece of music that most
people — listeners, performers alike
— don’t know quite what to do with it.
It begins with exactly the same four
bars as Liszt’s Les Preludes,
and goes on to encompass a vast music
drama with more story in it than Götterdämmerung
in about one tenth the time span. Stokowski’s
version pulls out the emotional stops
and leaves one overwhelmed but occasionally
has difficulty sounding like a real
symphony orchestra. Comissiona gives
us an authentic orchestral workout,
a very rich emotional performance without
losing sonic perspective, and the sound
is wonderful!
For best effect the
Saint-Saëns work requires a huge
hall and a huge organ, although I have
heard it attempted with squeaky on-stage
electric organs. One famous recording
has the organ blatantly out of tune
throughout — another way to destroy
the work. The difficulty of an orchestra
and an organ playing together in a huge
auditorium — sound takes 2/10 of a second
to travel 200 feet (60 metres) — was
cleverly overcome by the composer making
it unnecessary for the two parts to
be exactly synchronised while allowing
them to merge effectively. The result
is a work of a size unprecedented in
the symphonic literature. The organ
hardly plays any real music at all,
at first merely whispering in the 32
foot pipes, then issuing mighty snarls
and mightier roars as the orchestra
dances at its feet in ever-heightening
frenzy like worshippers at a Pagan shrine.
Even the mighty piano is humbled, degraded,
permitted only to contribute a tinkling
texture to the mass. Finally in a magnificent
oracular pronouncement the organ thunderously
intones the descending C major scale,
the Gods revealing to Man the fundament
of all music, at which the orchestra
achieves a collective trans-Beethovenian
orgasm. One friend of mine referred
to the work as "music to make God
feel inadequate". This is a performance
worthy of that accolade; one of the
very best I’ve ever heard both technically
and musically. Comissiona enhances the
sense of grandeur by avoiding the pitfall
of amateur conductors (like Bernstein)
in resisting the tendency overly to
accelerate tempo along with the intensifying
orchestral texture.
Obviously this is a
work written for DVD-Audio, and the
engineers have fully matched the musicians
in their dedication and skill. This
is a recording to test your woofers
as well as the rest of your speaker
system to maintain clarity and musicality
at these humungous sound levels. If
you live in an apartment house, you’d
better invite the neighbours over to
listen with you to keep them from calling
the police. This could have been an
original three channel master, but if
it was originally a two channel master,
the engineers have been very circumspect
in synthesising a very subtle acoustic
track for the rear speakers resulting
in a realistic, very large sound.
So, how does it sound
if you don’t have a DVD-Audio player
and must be content with listening to
the DVD-only surround sound tracks?
Well, not as good, obviously; but if
you turn your bass control up and shift
the balance toward the rear speakers,
it’s still pretty impressive. They give
you all the dynamic range, but with
some increase in distortion and decrease
in definition.
The Cinemaster DVD
player under Windows 98 produced extremely
distorted sound. The DVDX software player
under Windows 98 wouldn’t play the disk
at all. On Windows 2000, the DVDX player
played the disk well enough but tended
to skip in tenth-of-a-second increments.
My version of Power DVD played only
the two channel tracks. The Orion player
has long since been erased; it’s so
crashy it won’t play anything through.
My Sony DVD player did a particularly
good job.
Here is the list of
people who gave us such a fine DVD-Audio:
Original recording
Producer: Seymour Solomon
Original recording
engineer: Tom Lazarus
Executive producers (DVD): John Trickett,
Jeff Dean, Bob Michaels
5.1 mix: Rich Fowler at 5.1 Production
Services
5.1 Mastering: Adrian Van Velsen at
5.1 Mastering
Mastering Assistant: Michael Yip
Chief Engineer: Chris Haynes
Audio Transfers: Ken Ramos
Transfer QC: Jason Desmond
Audio restoration: Michael Yip, Rich
Fowler, Ken Ramos
Audio encoding: Michael Yip
Video production and encoding: A. J.
Lara
Authoring: Ignacio Monge at 5.1 Production
Services
Voice talent (in the speaker set-up
utility): Janelle Guillot
For 40 years the Munch
recording has been the standard both
for performance and sound, but if this
disk is any example, the time may soon
come when it must yield the throne.
But not quite yet. Age and cunning still
triumph over youth and strength.
Paul Shoemaker
Houston Symphony Orchestra/Sergiu Comissiona 
DVD-Audio
playable on all DVD players 