Four years ago I wrote about a very interesting collection called Miserere, subtitled "Music For the Holy Week Litugy." It includes the famous "Miserere" by Gregorio Allegri, a setting of Psalm 51:

Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions.

and a number of other appropriate works.  Here's the link to that post. Earlier today I discovered that the entire recording is now on YouTube. This link is to the first track. I think it will be followed by the others though you may have to use the "Watch On YouTube" button to get them. 

I have a rule to which I stick pretty closely: I don't write about a piece of music until I've heard it three times. That applies whether it's a three-minute pop song or a ninety-minute Mahler symphony (sometime in the next month or two I'm going to say something about his Sixth). After I'd heard this concerto three times I began this post as follows:

"I don't quite know what to say about this concerto. I like it a lot, and in that I seem to be in agreement with a great many people, as Wikipedia says it's frequently performed and recorded, and has been performed 192 times at Carnegie Hall. And yet...I feel that I should like it more. Why? It's the first movement: my head says that I should love it, but my heart doesn't follow along."

But in the process of writing I changed my mind. I kept going back to that first movement to refresh my memory, ended up listening to it twice more, and now I love it. And the whole concerto. 

I can't describe it like the Wikipedia author does:

The first movement opens with the solo piano, playing simple chords in the tonic key before coming to rest on a dominant chord. The orchestra then enters with the same theme, in B major, the major mediant key, which is in a chromatic mediant relationship to the tonic. 

And so on in that vein, and I can't say much more than "ok fine whatever" to most of it. It isn't that I don't understand any of the terms at all--I know what "tonic key" and "dominant chord" mean. But I'm lost at "chromatic mediant relationship." Even if I understand these descriptions, I don't hear them--that is, I don't hear that what was stated in G is restated in B.

Still, I'll risk embarrassment by saying that I'm a little puzzled by that description of the opening. Simple chords? Well, I guess that's right. But what I hear is an energetic and really fairly simple tune presented by the piano alone, so simple that it could almost be called a motif (or in my more familiar vocabulary, a riff or maybe even a lick): only three notes of the scale in a distinctive rhythm: 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 3. (I don't think those accents are really there, but my brain supplies them anyway.) In that respect it made me think of the opening of the Fifth Symphony, the supreme motif in its combination of simplicity and power. Very catchy. 

The orchestra enters and soon gives us a more typical, you might say a more melodious, melody, a lyrical one, and there follows fifteen minutes or so of fascinating and affecting interplay, with that initial rhythm appearing and disappearing throughout. What didn't affect me on those first three hearings somehow blossomed on the next two. It's relatively subdued, by which I mean that it never seems to be striving for passion and grandeur, as Beethoven sometimes seems to be; not that it lacks these, but it's lyrical, in an almost dignified way. And, naturally, continually interesting.

The very brief second movement fascinates me. In fact, on my first couple of hearings I found it far more involving than the first movement. By "very brief" I mean it's a little under five minutes long in the recording I have, the same Alfred Brendel one that I listened to for the first three concertos. (I see that some recordings are around six minutes--I want to hear one of those.) For most of it the piano and the strings (alone, no other instruments) alternate, not playing together at all. The strings play, then stop, and the piano responds. I hear the string part as a sort of doleful march, and didn't know until I read it in the Wikipedia article that it's based on the traditional Dies Irae chant. The piano responds mournfully. It's almost spooky. The strings gradually fade away. The piano sounds more and more as if it's strayed into a Chopin piece, and for a few moments, to my ears, as if it had flashed into a time warp and spent a few bars in 1901. I love this movement but I don't understand what it's doing in this concerto. It's almost desolate.

The second gives way without pause to the third, which is like the final movement of the first three concertos, fast (mostly) and exhilarating. The absence of space between the second and third must signify something, but personally I think I'd like a few moments of reflection between them. 

The Fourth Piano Concerto was written around the same time as the Fourth Symphony, and strikes me as similar in one very broad way: its relative modesty as compared to some of Beethoven's later work. The Fourth Symphony is one of my favorites, so its not surprising that I like this concerto quite a lot. Now on to the 5th, the "Emperor." I heard it a few times, long ago, and don't recall anything about it except an impression that it's *really* Beethoven-ish.

When I wrote about Tallis's Lamentations of Jeremiah a couple of weeks ago I mentioned that the LP I had was a 1969 "rechanneled for stereo" reissue of a recording originally made in 1955. Rechanneling was a gimmick used for a while in the earlier days of stereo, when purchasers paid a significantly higher price for stereo. As I recall, it was 20-25% higher--I think monaural LPs sold for about $4, stereo for $5. 

Audiophiles really hated rechanneled stereo. And maybe not just audiophiles, if by "audiophile" we mean people with exquisitely sensitive hearing who pay extremely close attention to sound reproduction and have extremely high standards. Also, frequently, rather high incomes, as the equipment needed to satisfy those connoisseurs is generally quite expensive. I didn't know much about that debate, but have always had the impression that the techniques used to split a single recorded track into two channels sometimes produced undesirable effects audible to non-obsessive but attentive listeners. 

Out of curiosity, I decided to test that judgment. I mean test it on myself--I'm certainly willing to believe that the problem is real, as it's been well attested to since the '60s. But is it a problem for me? Do I actually hear those effects? And if so how much do they matter?  

The only way to do that, obviously, is to compare two recordings, one mono and the other a rechanneled version of the first. Before the internet, it wouldn't have been practical for me to do that. Not impossible, but not practical--it would have taken too much trouble to locate and purchase the records. But now we have the wonderful web service Discogs, which is not only a vast storehouse of information (discographies), but a marketplace where used record dealers all over the world can sell ti customers all over the world. I was able to identify a 1972 monaural pressing of the Deller/Tallis recording, with at least half a dozen available to buy.

Just for fun, I picked one in mint condition--meaning unopened, still in the shrink wrap. It was only a couple of dollars more than several in near-mint condition, and still under $10, though shipping charges were as much as the purchase itself. (The seller was Satellite Records in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and I recommend them. Yes, the shipping charge was high, but not unusual for a single LP, and the record was very well packaged, and arrived more quickly than I expected.)

"Mint" and "Near-Mint," by the way, are official or at least conventional terms, with agreed-upon definitions. Descending from there, you have VG+ (Very Good Plus), VG, G, F(air), P(oor). 

If you looked back at the previous post on this (or have a good memory), you'll notice that the cover of this LP is different. The performance was originally released under the Vanguard label, and issued on that label more than once, then later on the Bach Guild label, which was a Vanguard subsidiary. 

So what about the test? Well, I'll state outright that I don't regard it as conclusive. I did hear a difference, but it was not huge, and I don't have either the sensitive hearing or the vocabulary to describe it in any detail. But for what it's worth, here's my impression.

Most TVs and computer monitors have controls for adjusting brightness, contrast, color, and sometimes more esoteric parameters. Many have presets by which you can choose a predefined  combination of these adjustments meant to be optimal for movies, games, sports, and so forth. When you switch these, you may be startled by a fairly dramatic difference in what you see. You may not be able to pinpoint exactly what's changed, at least if you aren't any more interested than I am in trying to figure it out. You may even have trouble deciding whether it's better than the previous setting. But it's obviously different. 

That's what it was like when I listened to the mono version of this LP after listening to the rechanneled stereo version. I certainly had not been conscious that there was anything wrong with the latter. But the mono version seemed more vivid and more present. This is exactly the opposite of what is supposed to happen with mono and stereo: the whole point of stereo is to use two channels to create an illusion of three-dimensional sound, in which not all the components of the sound reach your ears at exactly the same time. (If you want a good explanation, read the Wikipedia article.) You should, if the recording and the equipment are right, have a sense of the sound being produced by something located in the space between the speakers. At best, you should "see" the performers. It's very pleasing when it works properly.

But, as I said, with these two recordings, it was the mono and not the "stereo" one that seemed more  present. The mono one didn't have the three-dimensional quality of real stereo, but it was...and I'm having trouble describing this...more solid. The pseudo-stereo image was spread around and vague. The mono image was actually more, not less, defined. 

I wonder how many rechanneled-for-stereo LPs I have. As I write this it is crossing my mind to find them and replace them, but I'm not going down that rabbit hole. Almost certainly they are things I've listened to three or four times at most in forty or fifty years.

I can't vouch for the attribution, but there's way too much truth in this.