Search - Haydn Beethoven :: Michelangeli in Performance

Good historical recording

Jeffrey Chan | Silicon Valley | 12/02/1999

(3 out of 5 stars)

"Michelangeli's performance on the Emperor Concerto is admirable and the Paris Symphony is sympathetic, but it should be pointed out this is a 1975 recording. The sound is reasonably clean but it is slightly noisy and there are several places in the recording where there is audible distortion perhaps due to microphone or tape overload. It also seems to be a live recording, given the coughs audible, and should have been labelled as such.



The sound quality on the Haydn Concerto is several notches down from the Beethoven. It is a mono recording with little dynamic or frequency range. Recording technology was *much* better than this in 1967 so perhaps this was a bootleg or backup tape, or the sound engineers were ungifted amateurs. It too is a live performance.



The performances are good. The sound is not."