Shostakovich
Symphony No. 1 / The Age Of Gold - Ballet Suite

*NOTE: On side 2, there is a mark that plays 6 times at a light to moderate level near the start of the first movement of The Age Of Gold.

Vintage covers for this album are hard to find in exceptionally clean shape. Most of the will have at least some amount of ringwear, seam wear and edge wear. We guarantee that the cover we supply with this Hot Stamper is at least VG

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The second picture you see is the original Living Stereo release.

Our Story

The first copy of the album I got my hands on and needle-dropped blew me away with its big, open, clear, solid orchestral sound. Close to three years later, when we had enough copies to do this shootout, sure enough it won. That rarely happens -- in a big pile of records there's almost always something better than whatever we've heard -- but it happened this time.

Imagine if we had played one of the bad sounding or noisy ones to start with. It's unlikely we would have been motivated to pursue the title and consequently the shootout we just did would have never happened. Lucky for us all that that first copy was so good.

These sides are "real" sounding, with a clean bottom and clean lower mids. Little to no smear. The sound is full-bodied and rich, yet clear and clean, and spread out on a huge stage -- it's yet another example of proper Orchestral Reproduction.

This is the kind of record that will make you want to take all your heavy vinyl classical pressings and put them in storage.

What The Best Sides Of This Decca Recording 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 1959
• 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.

Kingsway and The London Symphony Orchestra

This record shows off Decca sound at its best. The full range of colors of the orchestra are here presented with remarkable clarity, dynamic contrast, spaciousness, sweetness, and timbral accuracy.

If you want to demonstrate to a novice listener why modern recordings are so consistently unsatisfactory, all you have to do is play this record for them. No CD ever sounded like this.

The richness of the strings, a signature sound for Decca in the Fifties and Sixties, is on display here for fans of the classical Golden Age. It's practically impossible to hear that kind of string sound on any recording made in the last thirty years (and this of course includes practically everything pressed on Heavy Vinyl).

It may be a lost art but as long as we have these wonderful vintage pressings to play it's an art that is not lost on us. I don't think the Decca engineers could have cut this record much better -- it has all the orchestral magic one could ask for, as well as the clarity and presence that are missing from so many other vintage Golden Age records.

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.

We often have to go back and downgrade the copies that we were initially impressed with in light of such a standout pressing. Who knew the recording could be that huge, spacious and three-dimensional? We sure didn't, not until we played the copy that had those qualities, and that copy might have been number 8 or 9 in the rotation. Think about it: if you had only seven copies, you might not have ever gotten to hear a copy that sounded so open and clear. And how many even dedicated audiophiles would have more than one or two clean original copies with which to do a shootout?

One further point needs to be made: most of the time these very special pressings are just plain move involving. When you hear a copy do what this copy can, it's an entirely different - and dare I say unforgettable -- listening experience.

Production and Engineering

James Walker was the producer for these sessions in glorious Kingsway Hall. It's yet another remarkable disc from the Golden Age of Vacuum Tube Recording.

The gorgeous hall the London Symphony recorded in was one of the best venues of its day. Scores of amazing sounding recordings were made there by Decca using an All Tube Recording Chain being fed by the Decca "Tree" miking setup.

There is a solidity and richness to the sound that goes beyond practically any other recordings we know of, yet clarity and transparency are not sacrificed in the least.

What We're Listening For On Symphony No. 1 / The Age Of Gold

• 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 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.

Classic Records Release on Heavy Vinyl

It's been quite a while since I played the Classic pressing, but I remember it as fairly typical of their mediocre-at-best catalog, tonally fine but low-rez and lacking space, warmth and above all Tubey Magic.

I don't think I've ever played an original or a VICS reissue that didn't sound better, and that means that the best grade to give Classic's pressing is probably a D: below average.

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Excerpt from Anthony Kershaw's review

This particular recording of the work is splendid. In fact, Jean Martinon and the London Symphony Orchestra present one of the finest renditions. Their personification of style, interpretation and ensemble are a trinity of near perfection.

From the opening clarinet solo (Gervase de Peyer, perhaps?) to the closing orchestral fortissimos, the late fifties LSO shines gloriously. Strings have a beautiful golden sheen, woodwinds glow and brass resonate thrillingly. And the recording - simply spectacular! The Decca-sourced RCA displays Kingsway Hall to perfection, with its requisite Holborn/Aldwych "tube" rumble. By this account, London Transport were on time, the regular deep growling adding visceral pleasure to the audiophile need quotient.

Side One

Symphony No. 1 In F Minor, Op. 10

Written at the age of eighteen, Shostakovich’s First Symphony was the graduation piece that completed his studies at the Leningrad Conservatory. It has been likened to the opening chapter of a novel, setting the tone for all that follows. The composer’s trade-mark musical gestures are all immediately obvious. Nervous tension and sarcastic wit, passion and intelligence, contemplation and action, nobility and banality – all expressed with an economy of means that is simultaneously subtle and direct.

The symphony opens with a virtuosic brilliance heavily influenced by Stravinsky’s Petrushka. But perhaps it was not only that work’s orchestration, with its soloistic piano part, that fascinated the student composer. Like Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, another piece he admired, the disconcerting idea of human beings as puppets, with their actions manipulated by unseen string-pullers from on high, was one that stayed with the composer right the way through to his final symphony, written almost fifty years later.

After composing the first two movements, Shostakovich wrote to a friend that it would be more fitting to call the work a ‘symphony-grotesque’. But the style was about to change. ‘I am in a terrible mood,’ he continued. ‘Sometimes I just want to shout. To cry out in terror. Doubts and problems. All this darkness suffocates me. From sheer misery, I’ve started to compose the finale of the symphony. It’s turning out pretty gloomy.’

The second half of the piece is certainly much more tragic in vein. Now the influences are more old-fashioned than contemporary, with Mahlerian string sonorities and Tchaikovsky-like descriptions of fate and death.

The directors of the conservatory, excited by the genius they felt they had nurtured, arranged for the symphony to be performed by Nikolai Malko and the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra. The première, on 12th May 1926, was an enormous success, and it was not long before the work gained worldwide recognition.

Shostakovich himself called the première his ‘second birth’. The Soviet Union had discovered its first international star, the first to be trained solely under the new system rather than old imperialist Russia, and the authorities proclaimed him as an exaltation of the new at the expense of the old. In time, this much repeated role would become as much a burden to him as it was a saving grace.

--Mark Wigglesworth

• 1st Mov. Allegretto
• 2nd Mov. Allegro
• 3rd Mov. Lento
• 4th Mov. Allegro Molto (Introduction)

Side Two

Symphony No. 1 In F Minor, Op. 10 (continued)

• 4th Mov. Allegro Molto (Conclusion)

The Age Of Gold - Ballet Suite, Op. 22

Shostakovich extracted this suite from his unsuccessful 1930 so-called athletic ballet, The Age of Gold, about the adventures of a Soviet soccer team abroad. The suite's four unnamed movements last a mere 16 or 17 minutes.

The opening movement, "Introduction," derives from the work's overture. It is vigorous and colorful, sassy and sarcastic, auguring the music in the composer's 1936 Symphony No. 5.

After a playful, mischievous opening, a parade of themes and light moods ensues, with numerous tempo shifts, the whole sounding episodic in its generally comic character.

The ensuing Adagio, fully half the entire length of the suite, begins with a lovely, if slightly sour theme on soprano saxophone, representing a cabaret singer in the ballet. The middle section turns darkly intense, but the outer panels are dreamy and nocturnal.

The ensuing Polka, satirizing League of Nations politicians, is humorous if a bit overdone, and the concluding rambunctious "Dance," whose music is associated with the soccer team in the ballet, clearly exhibits the influence of Stravinsky's Petrushka.

--Allmusic

• No. 1. Introduction
• No. 2. Adagio
• No. 3. Polka
• No. 4. Dance

Rave Review

A powerful feeling of ineptness can greet musicians when performing Dmitri Shostakovich's First Symphony. Technically, it is extremely difficult, and contains a musical sophistication that is quite staggering. The symphony was offered to the jury of the Leningrad Conservatory as his graduation exercise! Even today, the wealth of invention continues to amaze, more so when one recognizes that young Shostakovich's unique musical voice was already formed - a voice that continued to speak and develop in all his work, one representative of the essence of the gigantic struggles of the Soviet people.

This particular recording of the work is splendid. In fact, Jean Martinon and the London Symphony Orchestra present one of the finest renditions. Their personification of style, interpretation and ensemble are a trinity of near perfection. From the opening clarinet solo (Gervase de Peyer, perhaps?) to the closing orchestral fortissimos, the late fifties LSO shines gloriously. Strings have a beautiful golden sheen, woodwinds glow and brass resonate thrillingly.

And the recording - simply spectacular! The Decca-sourced RCA displays Kingsway Hall to perfection, with its requisite Holborn/Aldwych "tube" rumble. By this account, London Transport were on time, the regular deep growling adding visceral pleasure to the audiophile need quotient.

As a filler, the Ballet Suite from The Age of Gold is representative of Shostakovich at his sarcastic best. The piquant orchestration is, again, performed with reckless abandon by the virtuosos of the London Symphony, with the famous oblique-styled Polka played especially well.

James Walker and Alan Reeve get the somewhat tricky acoustics of Kingsway just right. Imaging and the soundstage are exemplary, both adding to the splendor of the presentation. This is an example of what art as recorded sound should strive to be. A triumph for all participants.

-Anthony Kershaw, Audiophilia