When it comes to those final, minute adjustments and shifts in speaker attitude, height and footing, this record tells you everything you need to know. Are you there? Are the musicians here? Do ABM’s fingers dance and does Giulini hold the orchestra in check? Are you in the same space as the performance and does the creative tension hang inside the listening room? Is there a sense of the imposing power and scale of the orchestra on tap? if the answer to those questions is affirmative, you are well on your way to an optimised set-up. Just how affirmative tells you how far you still have to go. This really is the acid test for sheer musical presence.
These three discs don’t tell the whole story, but they do cover an awful lot of it. Between them they can achieve a remarkably good level of set-up. Of course, you might want to substitute your own personal preference for the ABM/Giulini Beethoven disc. But just be aware that its indispensable nature (at least to me) depends on its uncanny ability to present the human agency and musical chemistry in the performance. That’s the quality you are seeking in an alternative disc – and from the system once set-up is complete.
And the next step(s)…
It’s a classic but surprisingly common error to get a system set-up to play a single disc – to the detriment of all others! It’s particularly true when it comes to optimising VTA/VTF on a record player, where disc-to-disc variation can be huge. So, it’s a critical part of the process to back-check progress against other discs. As suggested earlier, those are the discs that come and go, depending on where my (or the system owner’s) listening biases lie at any particular moment in time. We are well beyond basic/technical parameters or acoustic measurement here. This is all about musical communication and that’s why discs in current use play such a prominent role. Even so, there are certain recording categories that, in one form or another, constitute ever-presents. Dumped on the shore of the audiophile desert island, I’d want at least one of each to hand…
These are examples, but they are recurring examples and, if in doubt, these are the ones I reach for:
Solo Piano
Víkingur Ólafsson – Debussy/Rameau
DGG 4834 7701 (CD), DGG UCCG 1868 (SHM CD), DGG 483 8283 (2xLP)
When it comes to the placing and spacing of notes, their length, decay and the silence between them, there are few recordings or instruments more telling (or wider in bandwidth) than solo piano. Ólafsson’s thoughtful, graceful articulation and unhurried phrasing adds dynamic discrimination, note-weight, the layered, harmonic complexity and scale of the instrument to the mix.
Honourable mentions: Clifford Curzon’s Mozart 20/27 on Decca (available on CD, SACD and LP) keeps coming back, as does Mitsuko Uchida’s Beethoven 4th Piano Concerto, a live concert with the Berliner Philharmonic. Not strictly solo, it’s exposed solo passages certainly fill the bill, while the sensitivity in the playing, pacing and spacing of notes is sublime.
