Borodin / Rimsky-Korsakov
Polovetsian Dances / Le Coq D'Or Suite / Dorati

*NOTE: Side one of this record was not noisy enough to rate our M-- to EX++ grade, but it's not quite up to our standards for Mint Minus Minus either.

This vintage Mercury pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn't showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to "see" the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It's what vintage all analog recordings are known for -- this sound.

If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it -- not often, and certainly not always -- but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.

What The Best Sides Of Polovetsian Dances With Chorus / Le Coq D'Or Suite Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear

• The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
• The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1958
• Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
• Natural tonality in the midrange -- with all the instruments having the correct timbre
• Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space

No doubt there's more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.

Copies with rich lower mids and nice extension up top did the best in our shootout, assuming they weren't veiled or smeary of course. So many things can go wrong on a record. We know, we've heard them all.

Top end extension is critical to the sound of the best copies. Lots of old records (and new ones) have no real top end; consequently, the studio or stage will be missing much of its natural air and space, and instruments will lack their full complement of harmonic information.

Tube smear is common to most vintage pressings. The copies that tend to do the best in a shootout will have the least (or none), yet are full-bodied, tubey and rich.

Learning the Record

For our shootout, we had at our disposal a variety of pressings that had the potential for Hot Stamper sound. We cleaned them carefully, then unplugged everything in the house we could, warmed up the system, Talisman'd it, found the right VTA for our Triplanar arm (by ear of course) and proceeded to spend the next hour or so playing copy after copy on side one, after which we repeated the process for side two.

If you have five or more copies of a record and play them over and over against each other, the process itself teaches you what's right and what's wrong with the sound of the album. Once your ears are completely tuned to what the best pressings do well that the other pressings do not do as well, using a few carefully chosen passages of music, it quickly becomes obvious how well a given copy can reproduce those passages. You'll hear what's better and worse -- right and wrong would be another way of putting it -- about the sound.

This approach is simplicity itself. First, you go deep into the sound. There you find a critically important passage in the music, one which most copies struggle -- or fail -- to reproduce as well as the best. Now, with the hard-won knowledge of precisely what to listen for, you are perfectly positioned to critique any and all pressings that come your way.

It may be a lot of work but it sure ain't rocket science, and we've never pretended otherwise. Just the opposite: from day one we've explained step by step precisely how to go about finding the Hot Stampers in your own collection. Not the good sounding pressings you happen to own -- those may or may not have Hot Stampers -- but the records you actually cleaned, shot out, and declared victorious.

What We're Listening For On Polovetsian Dances With Chorus / Le Coq D'Or Suite

• Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
• The Big Sound comes next -- wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
• Then transient information -- fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
• Powerful bass -- which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
• Next: transparency -- the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
• Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing -- an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.

Vinyl Condition

Mint Minus Minus and maybe a bit better is about as quiet as any vintage pressing will play, and since only the right vintage pressings have any hope of sounding good on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell. (The copies that are even a bit noisier get listed on the site are seriously reduced prices or traded back in to the local record stores we shop at.)

Those of you looking for quiet vinyl will have to settle for the sound of other pressings and Heavy Vinyl reissues, purchased elsewhere of course as we have no interest in selling records that don't have the vintage analog magic of these wonderful recordings.

If you want to make the trade-off between bad sound and quiet surfaces with whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing might be available, well, that's certainly your prerogative, but we can't imagine losing what's good about this music -- the size, the energy, the presence, the clarity, the weight -- just to hear it with less background noise.

Side One

• Le Coq D'Or Suite - Rimsky-Korsakov
King Dodon In His Palace
King Dodon On The Battlefield
King Dodon With Queen Shemakha
Marriage Feast And Lamentable End Of King Dodon

Side Two

• Polovetsian Dances From "Prince Igor" With Chorus - Borodin

Polovetsian Dances

Alexander Borodin was a self-described “Sunday composer”: a scientist by day, he wrote music in his free time but nonetheless won enough acclaim as a composer of Russian art music to gain a position among the country’s “Mighty Handful.” He began writing music as a devotee of Mendelssohn, but quickly changed his language to something of a more nationalistic bent. Still, echoes of Mendelssohn’s style, particularly his talents for lyrical, melodic writing, remain an underlying theme in Borodin’s later, folk-influenced works.

Because of his lifelong work in chemistry and medicine, Borodin’s output is, relative to other composers, exceedingly small. His primary works include his Second Symphony, a handful of songs, a particularly notable String Quartet (the Second) and his opera Prince Igor, for which he wrote both the music and the libretto. Borodin worked on the opera for some two decades, but left it unfinished at his death in 1887. His colleagues Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov finished the work (including recreating the overture from sketches that Borodin had sung to his colleagues, a feat that Glazunov is said to have done from memory) in time for an 1890 premiere. The opera, though posthumous and largely filled in by others, took a respected position as an emblem of Russian nationalist music, and although the opera’s plot may more accurately be called a series of sketches, the total effect is still vibrant and unified.

By the end of the second act of Prince Igor, the title character has been taken prisoner by the Polovtsian Khan Konchak. The Khan, intrigued by his depressed captive, calls in a group of slaves to liven Prince Igor’s spirits. The servants’ songs begin as sentimental recollections of their homeland, but gradually gain vigor and become shouts in praise of the slaves’ royal master. The process takes roughly 11 minutes, during which a flurry of energetic winds and percussion join in a sparkling, rhythm-driven dance. The instrumentation is brilliant and crystalline, reliant upon powerful brass and soloistic woodwinds to brighten the already exotic, lithe melodies.

Borodin was not an ethnomusicologist; his sketches contain a handful of melodies that he apparently considered to be equally appropriate for both the main body of the opera and those parts which concern the nomadic Polovtsians. But in spite of a general disdain among the Mighty Handful for incorporating explicitly “ethnic” signatures (César Cui, a close friend of Borodin’s, was particularly emphatic about this), the Polovtsian scenes in Prince Igor do contain a smattering of appropriate rhythmic and melodic influences. In addition, Borodin’s bright tone colors, graceful melodic lines, and energetic rhythms create a general feeling of celebration and enthusiasm that make the work appropriate as a piece for both the operatic stage and the concert hall.

–Jessica Schilling, laphil.com

Le coq d’or (The Golden Cockerel) – Suite from the Opera

Near the very end of his life, Rimsky-Korsakov had decided to hang up his pen after finishing his 14th opera, The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevronija (1905). But then Russia’s political world began to disintegrate all around him. First, the increasingly imperialistic Tsar Nicholas II, much against popular support, essentially pushed Japan into beginning a war and Russia lost miserably (1904-1905), then, civilian unrest boiled over into the massacre of Bloody Sunday in 1905, when Russian troops opened fire on peaceful demonstrators killing more than 1,000. In reaction to that horrible day, Rimsky-Korsakov’s cherished students at the St. Petersburg Conservatory demonstrated and were expelled, and this was soon followed by his own dismissal. All of it compelled the veteran Nationalist composer to take action – through music. He became a musical dissident with one last opera, The Golden Cockerel (Le coq d’or, as it is usually referred to in French), completing it in 1907.

Rimsky-Korsakov built his opera on an intriguing poem, The Tale of the Golden Cockerel, written in 1834 by Alexander Pushkin (1789-1837), which itself was based on two stories from Tales of the Alhambra by Washington Irving. Pushkin’s poem is written in a folk style, giving it the burnished aura of a legend. The tale depicts an oafish Russian Tsar who goes off to battle for no good reason and comes to tragedy. Pushkin was a beloved Russian hero for audiences of the early 20th Century, and hence a potentially “safe” source for a musical dissident to hide his opera behind. Pushkin’s tale of a bully Tsar who sheds the blood of innocents inspired Rimsky-Korsakov to put the tale to music in a way that – with Pushkin’s fame to protect it – he hoped might let it slip past the censors and give his countrymen moral support in their current misery. But the censor’s were too clever, and the opera was banned until after the composer’s death, premiering with changes in 1909, just as the Revolution was beginning to gain momentum in Russia.

The Royal censors could see the obvious allusions to present day troubles. The tale’s Tsar Dodon is a fool – Tsar Nicholas II’s recent, tragic bumblings with Japan and his populous were anything but wise. Tsar Dodon is so stupid that he’s duped by a Magician who gives him a magic golden rooster that is promised to keep watch for enemy invaders. As payment, the Tsar promises to grant the Magician one wish. His own scheming appears to lead the Tsar into an unprovoked war with his beautiful neighbor, Queen Shemakah, and magic turns things against him. He’s woefully defeated by the Queen, but somehow deludes himself into believing the Queen wants to marry him. The wedding turns deadly as the Magician returns to claim the Queen as his wish, but he is instead killed, and the Tsar is pecked to death by the golden cockerel as a gruesome ending to a fantastical melodrama. When the chaos subsides, the rooster and the Queen have gone on their merry way. Pushkin’s poem offers the tale as both a “Whodunit” and a lesson in morality, and Rimsky-Korsakov follows the same strategy in his opera.

The story’s fairytale nature allows Rimsky-Korsakov to incorporate lots of atmospheric, exotically colored musical passages, with elements of Orientalism such as Arabic sounding melodies. In particular, for many scenes of the Tsar and the Magician, he uses the whole […] first exploited by one of Russia’s other music heroes, Mikhail Glinka, in his second opera Ruslan and Lyudmila (also based on another mock-epic by Pushkin), where the […] duplicitous characters. For Russian composers who followed, this scale became a musical code for evil, scheming characters. There was no coincidence that it appeared in association with the main characters in Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Golden Cockerel.

The Suite to the opera was crafted from the full opera, shortly after the composer’s death, by Rimsky-Korsakov’s son-in-law, Maximilian Steinberg, together with […] – making for the perfect, and sinister, fairytale atmosphere. Tasteful percussion moments dot the second movement along with many exotic instrumental combinations. Movement three is especially lovely, a kind of Scheherazade remake, but no less enchanting, and filled with lyricism. Also listen for the heavy use of the […] And, of course, everything ends very badly for Dodon, as Rimsky-Korsakov ends the music with growling […].

-Max Derrickson, musicprogramnotes.com