Various Composers
Balalaika Favorites

*NOTE: There are large, superficial scuffs on side 1 that do not play and cannot be heard. There is also a mark that plays 8 times at a moderate level about 1/4" into the fourth piece on side 2, "Dance Of The Comedians."

What do you hear on this pressing that you don’t hear on others? It’s very simple: the Balalaikas are delicate and sweet. There’s air all around them.

They have the kind of Midrange Magic that you hear on the best pop guitar records, the Tea For The Tillermans and the After The Gold Rushes of this world. When you hear that sound there’s no mistaking it. It’s what some of us audiophiles live for.

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 Balalaika Favorites 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 1962
• 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.

What We're Listening For On Balalaika Favorites

• 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.

The Classic Records Reissue Was a Real Bust

It’s been quite a while since I played the Classic pressing, but I remember it as unpleasantly hard and sour. Most of the later Mercury reissues pressed by Columbia had some of that sound, so I was already familiar with it when their pressing came out in 1998 as part of the just-plain-awful Mercury series they released.

I suspect I would hear it that way today. Bernie Grundman could cut the bass, the dynamics, and the energy onto the record. Everything else was worse 99% of the time.

The fast transients of the plucked strings of the Balalaikas was just way beyond the ability of his colored and crude cutting system. Harmonic extension and midrange delicacy were qualities that practically no Classic Records Heavy Vinyl pressing could claim to have.

Or, to be precise, they claimed to have them, and whether they really believed they did or not, they sure fooled a lot of audiophiles and the reviewers that write for them.

The better your stereo gets the worse those records sound, and they fall further and further behind with each passing year.

TAS List

Harry Pearson put this record on his TAS list of Super Discs, and with good reason: it’s wonderful!

Being on the TAS list doesn’t guarantee great sound, but Better Records does. If you don’t think a record sounds as good as we’ve described, we’ll always happily take it back and refund your money. Good luck getting ol’ Harry to send you a check when the TAS-approved pressings you pick up don’t deliver.

Vinyl Condition

Mint Minus Minus 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

• Fantasy On Two Folk Songs
• At Sunrise
• The Linden Tree
• Kamarinskaya
• Fantasy On Volga Melodies

Side Two

• On The Moonlight
• Midnight In Moscow
• Under The Apple Tree
• Dance Of The Comedians
• The Living Room
• Evening Bells
• My Dear Old Friend, Please Visit Me
• Waltz Of The Faun
• Flight Of The Bumble Bee

AMG Review by James Leonard

For what it is, it doesn't get any better than this. What it is, of course, is a collection of Russian folk music played with astonishing artistry by the Ossipov State Russian Folk Orchestra, an ensemble made up of dormas, gooslis, Vladimir Shepherd's Horns, and, naturally, balalaikas, balalaikas, balalaikas. The sound of such an orchestra is far different from any other Western ensemble -- imagine an orchestra of guitars, mandolins, pan pipes, and harps -- but still deep, colorful, and subtle. The sound of the music is likewise far different from any other Western music -- imagine folks songs long on melody and rhythm and short on harmony and form -- but still charming, delightful, and, in its own way, unutterably appealing.

Certainly, this disc charmed audiences when it was first released in the early 60s on Mercury Living Presence: the LP was a classical best seller. Part of the appeal might have been its incredibly realistic sound: recorded on 35 mm film on three channels, the LP quickly became a favorite of stereophiles everywhere. Restored in super-audio, three-channel digital, the disc sounds more realistic than ever, with the lead balalaika sitting in a chair to the listener's right and the lead goosli sitting in a chair on his/her left. While not for everyone, anyone who loves the exotic, the unusual, and the extraordinarily well-recorded will appreciate this disc.