New Years Day Concert in Vienna 1979 (2LP)
- Artists:
- Wiener Philharmoniker,
- Willi Boskovsky
$129.99
The 1979 New Year’s Day Concert in Vienna proved to be a watershed moment both musically and technically. It was both the end of an era for Willi Boskovsky, the Vienna Philharmonic’s longstanding concertmaster, and the dawn of a new age in recording technology. Long fêted as Decca’s first digitally recorded release, recent research has unearthed a set of analogue safety masters which have remain undisturbed in Universal Music’s vaults for almost half a century. Until today! Decca had made a huge investment in the new digital technology and with this at stake, it wasn’t just precautionary to run trusted analogue machines in parallel with digital, it was essential. This dual approach was used throughout the late 1970s and into the early 1980s.
Why return to the analogue masters? Early analogue-to-digital converters could yield a sound which was crisp and clean, yet also brittle. Gramophone magazine’s esteemed ‘Sounds in Retrospect’ panel praised the 1979 recording for its “spectacular clarity” but noted that “extreme treble was hard” and “the rather dead acoustic of a crowded Grosser Musikvereinsaal made all the instruments sound rather close and robbed the bass end of the spectrum of some of its warmth”. James Lock, the original balance engineer, later said to Decca colleagues that he had purposefully recorded in close-up to demonstrate the transparency of the new technology, However, he sanctioned the use of electronic reverberation on subsequent remasterings and for this analogue cut Rainer Maillard has used the live echo chamber at Emil Berliner Studios to recreate a bloom characteristic of Vienna’s Musikverein.
The Decca engineers remained in no doubt that digital recording was “the way ahead” but, in now presenting the original two track stereo analogue masters for the first time, perhaps we are taking a step back into the future.
This 1979 analogue edition is thus a unique piece of history.
“This is a riotous issue, historic into the bargain … This is truly a demonstration record in every way” Gramophone, 1979