Any Audiophile recording of The Planets?


I have Holst/The Planets by DG (Karajan) very good music but not so good sound (early digital recording) Any suggestion for the best sound of The Planets ?
ulf

Showing 3 responses by rushton

One of the best performances in excellent sound: Previn/LSO on EMI. The Mehta/LAPO on Decca/London is often cited as excellent sonically; the Previn is a better performance, imo.
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RWD: I agree with you, the Previn is the performance of this music I keep coming back to, and I far prefer it to Mehta, Boult or Susskind. I've not heard the Dutoit.

Jeffreybehr: the Previn is multi-miked, as were all the "two Christophers" recordings. And while I vastly prefer the early Decca engineering, I find the Previn such a superior performance that I'll tolerate the multi-miking, which in any event I don't find nearly as severe you describe. Some of the late recordings of Solti/CSO by J. Kenneth Wilkinson for Decca were far more eggregiously multi-miked (and Wilkie is one of my heroes). In any event, the capture of instrumental timbre and inner detail on the Previn EMI recording is superb.
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Jsujo, Boult made quite a few recordings of Planets. In the stereo era, he recorded this for EMI in 1966 and again in 1978. The one referenced by Jeffreybehr is the 1978 recording, Boult's last recording of this work.
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