Music Notes: Hyperion 99-Disc Complete Liszt Box Set

Hyperion Records has released a 99-disc box set of the long-running series they have been publishing of all of Franz Liszt’s piano music. Recorded by Leslie Howard, with the Budapest Symphony Orchestra for the concertos, this series has been a labor of love for some 25 years (the first disc was recorded in 1985, and was an early digital recording). Hyperion claims that it holds the Guinness world record for the world’s largest recording series by a solo artist; I don’t know of any that even come close.

Liszt’s music is an acquired taste; I’ve been listening to bits and pieces from this set since I got it nearly a year ago, and while some of the music is too over-the-top for my taste, much of it is very interesting. It contains 7,266 minutes of music, enough to keep anyone busy for a very long time. Discovering an oeuvre like this is a long-term process, and having all the music available in one set makes it possible to flip around from period to period to hear how Liszt grew.

A large number of these discs are transcriptions: of music from operas, of songs by Franz Schubert (11 hours’ worth), of Beethoven’s symphonies (masterful transcriptions indeed). The one set of works that has held me spellbound is the Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, a series of “mystical” keyboard works. This set is full of surprises, and I have barely scratched the surface so far.

It’s currently listed at €186 at Amazon FR, £228 at Amazon UK, and $302 at Amazon.com, with marketplace sellers offering it for less. Hyperion – one of my sponsors – also has it available for download, in MP3, FLAC and Apple Lossless formats, with impeccable metadata, and full notes embedded in each track. They sell it for £200, but you get an immediate 25% “bulk buy” discount, making it £150. And you don’t have to rip the CDs.

Essential Music: Bill Evans Live in 1980

Bill Evans may have been the greatest jazz pianist ever, but his life was, unfortunately, too short. Born in 1929, he died on September 15, 1980, of a bleeding ulcer, cirrhosis and pneumonia. A drug addict for much of his career – he had periods where he was hooked on heroin, and others on cocaine – his death was what a friend called “the longest suicide in history.”

Yet when Bill Evans sat down at the piano, magic come from his fingers. From playing piano as a sideman, such as on Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, widely considered to be the best jazz album of all time, to his first live recordings, Live at the Village Vanguard, made in 1961, and through dozens of solo and trio recordings over the following two decades.

In 1980, Evans didn’t know he was at the end, but there is a feeling of wistful nostalgia in his live performances of those last months. Fortunately, many of them were recorded, and there are three essential box sets of music from this period.

In June 1980, Evans played several dates at the Village Vanguard, and a six-disc set of these performances, Turn Out the Stars, was released in 1996. Recorded from June 4 to June 8, with bass player Marc Johnson, and drummer Joe LaBarbera, there is just over six and a half hours of music on this set, with notably a number of very long performances of Miles Davis’ Nardis, which was Evans’ signature jamming song. (It allowed both the bass player and drummer to take extensive solos.)

From August 31 to September 8, 1980, Evans played a series of dates at the Keystone Korner in San Francisco. Again, there are extensive recordings of these shows, with two 8-CD box sets available: The Last Waltz contains music from the first sets, and Consecration has tracks from the second sets. Just a week before his death, Evans was playing some of his finest performances. These were recorded on the sly, but the quality of the sound is excellent.

Evans played a combination of standards and his own compositions, and his improvisational ability is such that you barely notice it at times; it often sounds like the songs were written exactly as he played them, but as you listen to different versions, you can hear the changes.

I have long loved Evans’ music, and particularly these recordings from the end of his life. I first bought Turn Out the Stars in 1996, after listening to bits of it at a record store. My knowledge of jazz was quite limited then (and isn’t a whole lot more extensive now), but I immediately heard Evans’ masterful playing. When the other two box sets came out in 2000 and 2002, I bought them immediately. I have many Bill Evans recordings – I bought a couple of box sets of his complete recordings on different labels – but these are the ones I return to most, along with the 1961 Village Vanguard recordings. If you like jazz piano, these are essential recordings to own. If you just want one of the sets, I’d recommend Turn Out the Stars, which, with six discs, covers a wide variety of the songs Evans played.

Why Are There So Few Complete Sets of Schubert’s Lieder?

Yesterday, I received a copy of Naxos’ Deutsche Schubert-Lied-Edition, their 38-disc set of Schubert’s lieder, or art songs. Schubert’s lieder is one of my favorite parts of the classical repertoire, and I have many recordings by different singers. Yet, there are only two complete sets of his songs: the Naxos set, and Hyperion’s 40-disc set, which contains 37 discs of Schubert’s songs, together 3 discs of songs by his friends and contemporaries (which is a valuable addition to the set, putting Schubert’s songs in the broader context of his time).

This music is quite popular; singers regularly release new collections of Schubert’s lieder, and perform recitals of this music around the world. Yet only two complete sets of these songs exist. There are other monoliths of classical music that cover as many discs, or even more, and are better represented in the catalog. Take Bach’s cantatas, for example (another of my favorites). There are at least six complete sets of these works (either completed or in progress), and they cover around 60 CDs. Or Haydn’s symphonies: there are four complete sets of these, and they cover from 33 to 37 discs.

But Schubert’s lieder, even though popular (an Amazon search turns up more than 1,000 results) doesn’t inspire the same type of completeness.

It’s worth noting that the two existing Schubert sets were all “organized” or “overseen” by accompanists, rather than singers: Graham Johnson for the Hyperion edition, and Ulrich Eisenlohr for the Naxos. For the former, Johnson chose the best lieder singers of the time, over the many years it took to record the series. For the Naxos series, a focus was made on young German singers, rather than having singers whose native tongue was not German. (It’s worth noting that Johnson plays piano on all the Hyperion discs; Eisenlohr plays on 31 of the 38 Naxos discs.)

No one singer could record all of Schubert’s lieder. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau did record all of the songs for solo male voice, or more than half of them, on 21 CDs (my favorite Schubert lieder recordings), but he did not record those written for soprano, or part-songs, with multiple singers. So while an individual singer might oversee such a project, they couldn’t perform all the works. Also, this is a long project to realize, and no singer today could devote themselves to just Schubert’s music for that long. The total time of the Hyperion set is just under 43 hours (not counting the three discs of friends and contemporaries); the Naxos set is a bit over 40 hours. The amount of time it takes to record that much music is monumental.

There are many excellent lieder singers today, and, while it’s interesting to have a handful of discs from them, it would be nice to see more attention paid to these songs. The Hyperion and Naxos sets are both excellent, in different ways, and are complimentary, to those who really appreciate this music. But I’d love to see one or two more sets. Are any labels out there willing to take up the gauntlet? I could imagine Harmonia Mundi or Bis doing such a series; the former has already released several volumes of Schubert’s lieder by Matthias Goerne, and, while he couldn’t sing everything, perhaps they’ll continue with other singers.

One note: if you’re a fan of Schubert’s lieder, you should definitely own a copy of John Reed’s Schubert Song Companion, which gives excellent translations for all the songs. You should also get Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s Schubert’s Songs: A Biographical Study. This book is out of print in English, but used copies are available from many on-line booksellers. I have a copy of the French translation, and it’s an interesting look at the songs by someone who knows them very well. A commenter also points out The Fischer-Dieskau Book of Lieder, which contains some songs by Schubert, but also songs by other composers.

A note on the Naxos box set: this comes with a 429-page book, which includes track listings, notes on the music, for each disc, artist information, and indexes. It does not, however, contain song texts, either in the original German or in translation, though the song titles are translated on each disc’s sleeve. (You can download PDFs with sung texts for each volume of the series from this web page. The book is entirely in English, which is the “international version” of the set; there is also a “German version,” which presumably has this book in German. This book is impressive, and useful, but, frankly, I’d very much like to have it in PDF format. It’s hard to read CD liner notes with their small print, and a book this thick is a bit unwieldy. Nevertheless, it’s good that it’s included.

Also, flipping through the notes as I started listening to this set, I spotted a mention that six of the discs feature the fortepiano, the type of instrument that Schubert used, which is different from today’s piano. This is interesting, and I’m looking forward to hearing how these discs sound. This makes me think that if there were another complete set to be made, it would be nice if it were on fortepiano…

Album Notes: Charles Ives’ Violon Sonatas, by Hilary Hahn and Valentina Lisitsa

Charles Ives (1874-1954) is one of America’s most iconoclastic composers. Not a “professional” music maker, his modernist music was largely ignored during his lifetime, but that didn’t prevent him from composing music that stands out as unique and surprising. After studying music at Yale, he went on to make a large number of money in the insurance business, composing in his spare time. He wrote four symphonies, two piano sonatas, two string quartets, 114 songs, a handful of other works, and the four sonatas for violin and piano on this disc.

It’s refreshing to see a violinist of Hilary Hahn’s stature record these four violin sonatas, which have seen a handful of recordings, but never one as high-profile as this one. The performances of these works are sensitive and intimate, and the sound is excellent. The rapport between Hahn and Lisitsa is also evident, as they perform these difficult works in close symbiosis.

Ives’ music is tonal at times, atonal at others (particularly as his music evolved over the years), and notably features a number of “quotations” of American popular and folk songs. Listening to this music demands a great deal of patience, especially if you’re discovering Ives’ idiom for the first time. But this recording is an excellent way to discover Ives’ unique sound world. (The other place to start is with his wonderful Concord Sonata for piano – I have a special appreciation for this recording by Donna Coleman – which puts to music the ideas of the great inhabitants of Concord, Massachusetts: Emerson, Hawthorne, The Alcotts and Thoreau. And while I’m on the subject, let me point out this astounding orchestration of the Concord Sonata, by Henry Brant, and recorded by the San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas, who is a champion of Ives’ music.)

I’d like to note one criticism of this disc. Too often, recordings are made where one cannot take the time to appreciate the end of one work – especially if it consists of multiple movements – and the beginning of the next work. Some labels pay careful attention to this, adding extra silence between works. On this recording, there is hardly any silence, and you go from one work to the next without realizing, at times, that it’s a different sonata. It doesn’t cost anything to add silence, and it helps the listener appreciate the music, when they have a bit of time to reflect after a work ends.

Here’s Hilary Hahn in an NPR “Tiny Desk Concert,” performing some Bach, and some of the tunes that Ives uses in the violin sonatas:

Gadget Review: SRS iWow 3D Audio Enhancer for iPod, iPad and iPhone

In the search for better sound from portable devices, such as iPods, a number of add-ons (or plug-ins, literally) are available. There are several small headphone amps that you can use with an iPod or other portable music player, and then there’s the $70 SRS iWow 3D. This device plugs into the dock connector of your iPod, iPhone or iPad, and has a headphone jack for you to plug in your headphones or earbuds.

I tested the SRS iWow 3D on a number of devices, and with several different headphones. SRS claims that this device “Deliver[s] natural and immersive sound with deep, rich bass,” and that it “Dynamically locates and restores audio details buried in source material.” It does indeed change the sound of your music; the question is, is that change good or not? I think this type of device is something you will either love or hate, and that there’s not much middle ground.

First of all, the SRS iWow 3D does provide a feeling of surround sound, or what the company calls “immersive” sound. It’s actually quite impressive; there is a noticeable separation among instruments when it is on. While I wouldn’t call it surround sound – which SRS does not – it is more spacious. I don’t know exactly how this voodoo is worked, but some of it involves equalization and a change in overall volume. When you connect the SRS iWow 3D to your device, you press a small LED-lit button to turn it on; if the LED is off, it is merely passing the sound through without altering it. You can instantly notice that the volume is slightly increased, so to compare, you need to adjust the volume to try to hear both signals at the same loudness. The high end and low end are noticeably increased, and there is an overall augmentation of bass, something that portable players often lack.

In my tests with Beyerdynamic DT 990 32 amp headphones, I noticed a bit of hiss at the high end, with some types of music (this was more prominent with orchestral music than rock or pop); it seems that this treble boost is too much for some recordings. Jerry Garcia’s voice on Ripple sounds less smooth; the drums on U2′s Sunday Bloody Sunday are too punchy; and the bass on Brian Eno’s Just Another Day is almost distorted; and Bob Dylan’s voice on Desolation Row sounds processed and hissy.

On the other hand, when I plugged in a pair of Sennheiser PX 100-II i headphones, Bruce Springsteen’s Thunder Road sounded much better through the SRS iWow 3D; Lou Reed’s voice on Pale Blue Eyes stood out much more; and the acoustic guitar background on Bob Dylan’s Forever Young took on much more space.

(Note that most of my tests with classical music showed that the device, at least with good headphones, doesn’t help much.)

I performed the above tests first on an iPod classic. If you have an iOS device, you can use SRS’s iWow application to choose the type of output (headphones, speakers or car), and choose from advanced settings, such as Wide Surround, Deep Bass and High Treble. This gives you a bit more flexibility in the way the sound is rendered, and you can adjust these settings to fit your headphones. Results were a bit better using the device with the app.

My verdict is this: if you have good, relatively expensive headphones, the SRS iWow 3D won’t improve the sound of your music, and the adjustments it makes may not work with your headphones. However, if you use earbuds or portable headphones, notably with limited bass response, the SRS iWow 3D will give them a much better sound. Also, if you use an iOS device, the SRS iWow app will give you a bit more control over the sound.

This said, I think each listener will need to decide if they like the type of sound this device provides. You should ideally test this with your headphones to see how you feel about the sound.

One note: the LED on the device is bright, and, together with the actual signal processing, the SRS iWow 3D uses up a fair amount of battery life. SRS claims that this reduces battery life by approximately 18%. That’s a lot, if you use your iPod for several hours a day, and could be a deal-breaker.

How Many Matches Does iTunes Match Match, When iTunes Match Does Match Matches?

Apple introduced iTunes Match earlier this week, and I haven’t written anything about it, given that my colleagues at Macworld have done such a good job. I’m also busy working on an update to my Take Control of iTunes 10: The FAQ, which I hope to have finished very soon. (I also have some criticism of iTunes Match, which I wrote about for Macworld: iTunes Match shouldn’t shun those with big libraries.)

In the meantime, what has perplexed me in my experiments with iTunes Match is the number of tracks that aren’t matched. In some cases, a single song may not be matched, even though the rest of an album is matched – Lex Friedman, writing at Macworld, pointed out that in many cases, one song on The Beatles’ Abbey Road (She Came In Through the Bathroom Window) wasn’t matched, even though all the others were. (It turns out that in Lex’s survey of people who tried to match that album, I was the only person who did see that song matched.)

But it’s very odd that some things match and others don’t. I don’t think it has to do with Apple’s recognition algorithm, and suspect that it’s more of a bug. I’ve seen a number of cases where one or more tracks won’t match, even among items that I had purchased from the iTunes Store.

This morning I did an experiment for the people at Hyperion Records (who are one of my sponsors). They asked me to check two albums: one that is sold on the iTunes Store, and has sold quite well, and another, a compilation, that is not on the iTunes Store, but whose individual tracks are all available from the iTunes Store on different discs. The results were surprising: in both cases, some, but not all tracks were matched. In the first example, two of 14 tracks were not matched and had to be uploaded; in the second example, only 8 of 20 tracks were matched. The screen shot below shows the results (click to see a larger screen shot).

I’m perplexed by this, and I wonder how exactly Apple matches tracks. The album above that is sold on the iTunes Store uses exactly the same tags as in the files I tried to match, so if Apple were only matching by tags (which they are not), it would be a perfect match. I know they use some sort of acoustic fingerprinting, and I wonder what causes certain tracks to not be matched.

I have no answers here, simply evidence of the oddity of iTunes Match. If you have other interesting examples to share, feel free to mention them in the comments.

Addendum: it’s worth noting that if you have iTunes match files with poor or non-existent tags, you won’t get tagged versions of those tracks when you redownload them. iTunes stores your tags, and doesn’t supply tags based on their matches.

The Grateful Dead Movie Now Available on Blu-Ray

I remember well, back in the summer of ’77, when The Grateful Dead movie was released. I don’t recall exactly where it was showing in New York City, but with my friends, I went to see it shortly after it opened. It was in one of the few movie theaters that had Dolby sound, and the sound was, indeed, excellent (for the time).

Times have changed, and The Grateful Dead Movie is now available on Blu-Ray, with much better sound than the original film: as with the 2004 DVD release, there’s a 5.1 surround sound mix, this time with lossless audio (because there’s more room on the disc) and 1080p images.

Let’s face it: The Grateful Dead Movie is not a very good movie. It tries to be a cross between a concert flick – which was becoming common at that time – and an overview of what the Deadhead scene was like. Interspersed among the concert footage are interviews and films of people waiting on line at the Winterland, during what was thought to be, at the time, the Grateful Dead’s last concert run. (And that cheesy opening animation…)

Fortunately, this turned out to not be the case, and after the hiatus, the band came back strong. But this attempt to portray the anthropological nature of the scene took away from the concert footage. Had there been full songs, long jams, and uninterrupted musical sequences, together with the rest of the footage, this might have been a good movie, but when watching it, you want to hear the music, and it keeps getting cut off. I’m sure the reason was financial, but if only the movie had been an hour longer, it could have been a good record of the period, and had lots of music as well.

Fortunately, on both the DVD and Blu-Ray release, there are extra filmed tracks with music only. These total about 100 minutes, and are roughly the equivalent of a full set of a Grateful Dead concert, and features the following songs:

Uncle John’s Band
Sugaree
The Other One > Spanish Jam > Mind Left Body Jam > The Other One
Scarlet Begonias
China Cat Sunflower > I Know You Rider
Dark Star
Weather Report Suite

Not a bad setlist. So, while I have the DVD set already, I’ll certainly buy the Blu-Ray, but not for the movie itself; I’ll get it for those extra songs. There are very few good films of the Dead in the 70s, and this is the best record of a Dead show, until the 12/31/78 Closing of Winterland DVD set. Unfortunately, this show was only recorded on VHS, so the quality is not up to par. I really wish that more footage from the October 1974 shows – the ones recorded for The Grateful Dead Movie – were released, but I have a feeling that there’s not much left that’s salvageable. In any case, getting Dark Star, The Other One and China > Rider on a Blu-Ray is worth the price of admission.

An Overview of Apple Lossless Compression Results

I recently pointed out that the Apple Lossless codec has gone open source, meaning that this lossless codec can now be freely used in both hardware and software. The Apple Lossless codec is similar to FLAC, and offers the same advantages. When you compress files in a lossless format, you lose absolutely none of the original data. Just as when you compress a text file using zip compression, decompressing returns all the original letters and characters, lossless music compression provides the full fidelity of the original audio you compressed.

It’s interesting to look at the sizes of files compressed in Apple Lossless format. (These file sizes are similar for other lossless formats, such as FLAC, SHN and APE.) I took a handful of CDs, and ripped some tracks to show how the amount of compression can vary.

When comparing file sizes, the easiest way is to look at the bit rate that displays in iTunes. (Comparing file size is more difficult, as the different files used would have to be the same length for this to be valid.) This is an average bit rate, but it gives an idea as to the amount of compression that was achieved. Different types of music, notably with different instruments, result in compression rates that vary widely. Compare the bit rates below to the bit rate of uncompressed music on a CD, which is 1411 kbps.

Here are some examples:

• A solo harpsichord work by Johann Sebastian Bach: 902 kbps
• A solo piano work by Johann Sebastian Bach: 554 kbps
• A movement of a string quartet by Ludwig van Beethoven: 565 kbps
• A choral work by Johann Sebastian Bach: 690 kbps
• A piece for jazz piano trio by the Brad Mehldau Trio: 687 kbps
• A live recording of a song by the Grateful Dead: 796 kbps
• An excerpt from Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians: 597 kbps
• A movement of a symphony by Franz Schubert: 645 kbps
• A song for male voice and piano by Robert Schumann: 446 kbps

Again, these figures are in no way absolute, and for each piece of music, the resulting level of compression could be different if the tempo, volume or instrumentation varied. But what they do show is that some types of music – notably solo harpsichord, which has a high level of harmonics at high frequencies – compress less well than, say, solo piano or voice and piano. The range of compression for these examples is from 36% to 68%, with the majority of the examples clustering around the 50% level.

Note that I haven’t tested much rock music, and especially not much recently recorded rock or popular music. With many recent recordings having high volume and using compression (not the type that reduces data size, but the kind that reduces the dynamic range of music), file sizes can be much larger. If you listen to recent recordings of such music, you’ve probably noticed that they are often very loud, compared with, say, recordings from a couple of decades ago, and these will result in higher overall bit rates when using lossless compression.