MTT Das Lied: Mea culpa

ARQuint -- Sat, 10/18/2008 - 07:19

Though I still feel that the latest release in the remarkable Michael Tilson Thomas/SFS Mahler series, Das Lied von der Erde with Stuart Skelton and Thomas Hampson, is the best recording of just about anything I've heard in a while, I was wrong when it came to a technical matter. In the TAS/Playback write-up, I maintained that this was a 4.0 multichannel. It isn't; the center channel is there all right; it's just that it's pretty much devoted to the vocal soloist. I put my not-so-Golden ear up to the speaker during some purely orchestral passages and didn't hear anything and drew the wrong conclusion.

Understand that this isn't anything as egregious as, say, the James Taylor Hourglass SACD where, if you disconnect the center speaker, you won't hear any lead vocal at all with the multichannel program. With Das Lied, the soloists are placed in the right and left front channels as well, but the panning to the center does serve to firmly localize the singers' positions on stage in front of the orchestra in a natural fashion.

Andy Quint

Tom Martin -- Mon, 10/20/2008 - 20:32

Original review here on page 113:

http://magazine.playbackmag.net/playback/200810/

Note that this is part of an article on excellent multi-channel recordings.

CEO and Editorial Director, Nextscreen LLC

Tom Martin -- Thu, 11/06/2008 - 17:56

I just got this disc. I can say that the sound quality is excellent -- my favorite of the MTT SFS performances and recordings.

At lunch today, some of the TAS and Playback editors were discussing SACD. We noted that we tend to intuitively listen for superiority in tonal balance, but where SACD really shines is in the sense of space. In the case of Das Lied von der Erde, you can hear this space even in 2 channel mode.