The copy we are selling is similar to the one pictured above.
Sonic Grade
Side One: 
Side Two:
Vinyl Grade
Side One: Mint Minus Minus
Side Two: Mint Minus Minus
- These sublime works for violin and viola appear on the site for only the second time ever, here with solid Double Plus (A++) grades throughout this vintage London pressing
- It's also fairly quiet at Mint Minus Minus, a grade that even our most well-cared-for vintage classical titles have trouble playing at
- Both of these sides are doing just about everything right - they're rich, clear, undistorted, open, spacious, and have depth and transparency to rival the best recordings you may have heard
- The texture and harmonic overtones of the strings are perfection - as we listened we became completely immersed in the music on the record, transfixed by the remarkable virtuosity father and son bring to the pieces
- For those of you who keep track of such things, we would like to point out that no Decca pressing did better than "good" in our shootout
- The early London pressings we played are the only ones with the sonic goods befitting such an extraordinary recording, a reality that many audiophiles would do well to wrap their heads around
More of the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) / More Import Pressings on Decca and London
100% Money Back Guarantee on all Hot Stampers
FREE Domestic Shipping on all LP orders over $150
This vintage London 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 Sinfonia Concertante / Duo in G Major 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 1964
- 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.
Size and Space
One of the qualities that we don’t talk about on the site nearly enough is the SIZE of the record’s presentation. Some copies of the album just sound small -- they don’t extend all the way to the outside edges of the speakers, and they don’t seem to take up all the space from the floor to the ceiling. In addition, the sound can often be recessed, with a lack of presence and immediacy in the center.
Other copies -- my notes for these copies often read “BIG and BOLD” -- create a huge soundfield, with the music positively jumping out of the speakers. They’re not brighter, they’re not more aggressive, they’re not hyped-up in any way, they’re just bigger and clearer.
And most of the time those very special pressings are just plain more involving. When you hear a copy that does all that -- a copy like this one -- it’s an entirely different listening experience.
What We're Listening For On Sinfonia Concertante / Duo in G Major
- 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
- Sinfonia Concertante In A Flat Major For Violin, Viola And Orchestra K. 364
- Allegro Maestoso
- Andante
- Presto
Side Two
- Duo For Violin And Viola In G Major K. 423
- Allegro
- Adagio
- Rondeau, Allegro
Sinfonia Concertante for Violin, Viola and Orchestra (Mozart)
The Sinfonia Concertante for Violin, Viola and Orchestra in E♭ major, K. 364 (320d), was written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
At the time of its composition in 1779, Mozart was on a tour of Europe that included Mannheim and Paris. He had been experimenting with the sinfonia concertante genre[1] and this work can be considered his most successful realization in this cross-over genre between symphony and concerto.
The piece is scored in three movements for solo violin, solo viola, two oboes, two horns, and strings, the last including a divided viola section, which accounts for the work's rich harmony.
The solo viola part is written in D major instead of E♭ major,[a] and the instrument tuned a semitone sharper (scordatura technique), to give a more brilliant tone. This technique is less common when performed on the modern viola and is used mostly in performance on original instruments. However, modern violists that choose to play scordatura, the way Mozart originally composed it, will more easily project over the orchestra.