We announced it for January 30th, here it is today, for you to enjoy this weekend.
In our shop you will find a new SWF product (SWF D10) : Bruckner's Symphony No. 7, a performance by the Berlin Philharmonic on 18 October 1949.
Despite what one might have read, this is not a recording of one of the concerts given on 16, 17 and 18 October — which included Leonore II and Karl Höller's Cello Concerto No. 2 — but a radio production recorded in the orchestra's rehearsal room, the Gemeindehaus in Dahlem.
As we all know, recordings of this symphony — again with the BPO — were made in the Spring of 1951 in Cairo and then in Rome. To this must be added the irreplaceable document of the recording of the Adagio alone for Telefunken Records (1942). The 1949 performance is undoubtedly the most successful, benefiting from the concerts and their preparation, but also from the editing possibilities that enable an exemplary set-up.
In order to make this product available, we were able to work with a higher quality tape than the one used for the CD edition more than fifteen years ago. Indeed, Warner Classics kindly made available to us the recent Abbey Road digitisation of the copy of the tape used for the first pressings (Pathé-Marconi). This source stands out above all in terms of background noise, as its lower level makes it easier to read and thus optimises the musical content. Although we managed to remove some of the noise and improve some of the original edits, some saturation inherent in the original source remains. The coda of the 1st movement is such an orchestral outburst that one can hardly imagine how the technique of that time could have been able to deal with it...
The package includes: HD files (192-24), the same CD quality files (44-16), English/French digital booklets. For those who would like to burn a compact disc from the downloaded files, we have also included a cover and an inlay card, which can be printed out to fill the CD case. We also published another piece of news , to help you do this.