Vivaldi, Bach, et al.
Concertos For Cello / Janigro

*NOTE: 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. If you're looking for quiet vinyl, this is probably not the best copy for you.

This vintage Shaded Dog 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 Concertos For Cello 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 1960
• 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 and this is no exception. 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 for Concertos For Cello, 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 Concertos For Cello

• 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.
• 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

• Boccherini: Concerto For Cello In B-Flat

Side Two

• Vivaldi: Concerto For Cello In D
• Vivaldi / Bach: Concerto For Cello In G

Vivaldi's Concertos for Solo Cello

Vivaldi wrote an astonishing 500 concertos during his lifetime, of which 27 were composed for solo cello. At the time, the instrument was in its infancy, and it was unusual for great composers to write works specifically for solo cello. Indeed, none of the concertos were published during Vivaldi’s lifetime: they had been written specially for his young female students at the Ospedale della Pietà, where the composer was employed in Venice, and were therefore not widely known.

However, Vivaldi clearly saw the potential in the new instrument, otherwise he would not have gone on to write so much material for it; after the violin and bassoon, it is his third most popular solo concerto instrument. The sheer number of concertos allows the full emotional range of the cello to be explored, though Vivaldi stays relatively low in its register, fully exploiting the instrument’s rich and sonorous bass.

Contrary to popular beliefs that Vivaldi is repetitive, the concertos are packed with Baroque innovations; virtuosic passages feature lively arpeggios, rapid semiquavers and much rhythmic diversity. This period also saw a heightened use of syncopation, and a real emphasis on melody rather than the monodic music that had preceded it: we see this through Vivaldi’s employment of arpeggio, progression, augmentation and ornamental variation.

-BrilliantClassics.com

Antonio Janigro

Antonio Janigro (21 January 1918 – 1 May 1989) was an Italian cellist and conductor.

Born in Milan, he began studying piano when he was six and cello when he was eight. Initially taught by Giovanni Berti, Janigro enrolled in the Verdi Conservatory of Milan, where he was instructed by Gilberto Crepax. By 1934 Janigro was studying under Diran Alexanian and Pablo Casals at the École Normale in Paris. He graduated from the school in 1934 and began performing solo and in recitals with Dinu Lipatti, Paul Badura-Skoda and Alfredo Rossi.

An unfortunately timed vacation in Yugoslavia left Janigro stranded in that country for the duration of World War II. He became a professor of cello and chamber music at the Zagreb Conservatory, where his influence developed modern cello playing in Yugoslavia. He also performed as part of the Maček-Šulek-Janigro Trio. At war's end Janigro travelled throughout South America and the Far East as a soloist. In 1949, he started his career as a conductor. In 1959, he was Fritz Reiner's soloist, along with Milton Preves and John Weicher, in a renowned Chicago Symphony Orchestra recording of Strauss's Don Quixote.

An extraordinarily gifted teacher, Janigro educated many cellists around the world. Most of them studied at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Stuttgart and the Mozarteum Salzburg. Among his students were Julius Berger, Mario Brunello, Thomas Demenga, Michael Flaksman , Michael Groß, Antonio Meneses, Andrej Petrac, Mario de Secondi, Giovanni Sollima, Gustavo Tavares, Enrico Dindo and Christoph Theinert.

Janigro was a highly regarded conductor who led a symphony orchestra for Radio Zagreb and guest-conducted throughout Europe. The chamber orchestra I Solisti di Zagreb was created by Janigro and Dragutin Hrdjok in 1954 and was led by Janigro until he left the ensemble in 1968.

-Wikipedia