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I think that the new Quo Vadis recording sounds better than the old one. Though there is nothing like the original recording to a movie, the original Quo Vadis recording sounds so dry compared to the new one. Good job James Fitzpatrick. Please give Lucie Svehlova my regards as I am a violinist as well.
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I wouldn't expect a recording from 1950 to sound as good as a modern one. I do like the sound on the 1977 album, but too much material is missing. Rozsa had to reconstruct the full scores for the cues he recorded because MGM stupidly dumped their full scores and parts into a landfill in 1969.
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Many scores from 1950 DO sound remarkable, and as FSM has proven time and again, in the slightly later stereo era, amazing quality is as near as makes no difference on many recordings.
Rozsa however, in his quest for authenticity, which led him to all those amazing period tunes used, had for QV an obsession about authentic ambiences, which meant he kept all the neighbours at Borehamwood awake with night-time recordings of the marches, simply to get an outdoor ambience. This led to a dryness on some of those pieces. Great precision and pace, but dry and maybe a little clipped. In fact those marches sound more evocative in slight echo.
Tadlow, if you put the 'Hail Nero' through a waveform analysis, have pushed the sound to the limit to create a harshness on 'Hail Nero' that fits the film sound.
I find the exotic chamber pieces amazing on this new release. The sense of lavish pagan sensuality comes through on every instrument, it just works. The Prague people have excellent woodwind players. Sometimes modern recordings do that sort of thing well, but aren't so hot on the MIX of instruments in, say, a string quartet, but Tadlow have enough mike control to get both worlds accurate.
The venue (church?) for the London choral bits is quite echoey, and that's just right to convey an archaic sense of catacombs, quarries, and the ecclesiastical. That's an artistic decision, and the right one. The dryness of the original led to, for example, the cantor on 'Iesu Lord' sounding like Spike Milligan in comedy mode.
And of course, so many new pieces. I'm intrigued at how 'Hymn to Helios' comes out on the Poppaea scene, a piece never before heard.
Ustinov on screen clearly couldn't remember the tune he was meant to be singing (one of the Mesomedes 'Muse' tunes heard elsewhere in 'Dance of the Muses') for his 'Upon These Lilies' song, so he must've improvised. How would we ever guess how much work Rozsa put in with this score, a labour of love, without this new recording, which manages the vigour of the original, and the mystical feel of the 1970s re-recording, the best of both worlds.
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Another fantastic cathartic moment in the score is the bit where Lygia's theme suddenly surges back in 'The Burning of Rome'. Pure magic that bit, and to think they had the gall to delete the whole passage. Rozsa's 1970s edit doesn't do that piece any justice either.
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Yes, if Angel studios is a normal studio, then the 'churchy' ambience on the choral bits must've been a deliberate decision by James Fitz. A good call.
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Many scores from 1950 DO sound remarkable, and as FSM has proven time and again, in the slightly later stereo era, amazing quality is as near as makes no difference on many recordings.
Rozsa however, in his quest for authenticity, which led him to all those amazing period tunes used, had for QV an obsession about authentic ambiences, which meant he kept all the neighbours at Borehamwood awake with night-time recordings of the marches, simply to get an outdoor ambience. This led to a dryness on some of those pieces. Great precision and pace, but dry and maybe a little clipped. In fact those marches sound more evocative in slight echo.
Tadlow, if you put the 'Hail Nero' through a waveform analysis, have pushed the sound to the limit to create a harshness on 'Hail Nero' that fits the film sound.
I find the exotic chamber pieces amazing on this new release. The sense of lavish pagan sensuality comes through on every instrument, it just works. The Prague people have excellent woodwind players. Sometimes modern recordings do that sort of thing well, but aren't so hot on the MIX of instruments in, say, a string quartet, but Tadlow have enough mike control to get both worlds accurate.
The venue (church?) for the London choral bits is quite echoey, and that's just right to convey an archaic sense of catacombs, quarries, and the ecclesiastical. That's an artistic decision, and the right one. The dryness of the original led to, for example, the cantor on 'Iesu Lord' sounding like Spike Milligan in comedy mode.
And of course, so many new pieces. I'm intrigued at how 'Hymn to Helios' comes out on the Poppaea scene, a piece never before heard.
Ustinov on screen clearly couldn't remember the tune he was meant to be singing (one of the Mesomedes 'Muse' tunes heard elsewhere in 'Dance of the Muses') for his 'Upon These Lilies' song, so he must've improvised. How would we ever guess how much work Rozsa put in with this score, a labour of love, without this new recording, which manages the vigour of the original, and the mystical feel of the 1970s re-recording, the best of both worlds.
Yes. The original Hail Nero sounds very harsh, but it's almost a good sounding harshness. Especially on the drums. You can't hear the drums as nicely on the new recording as you can on the old.
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You're being a tad harsh, Basil.
Tadlow like to create an ambience in their records that is good and audiophile to the modern ear, BUT also approximates to a recreation of the original sound on the OST, and is 'faithful'.
Rozsa did make his marches harsh for QV (which he didn't for BH, KoKs, or even JC), as an experiment in 'authentic' outdoor ambience. Tadlow/Prometheus have had a go at that feel, but not so much as to make it an inferior recording.
If they try to emulate the original, they take flak, if they DON'T, they take flak.
Blame Rozsa. He scrapped the idea for his later Roman epics, but people do kick a stink if it hasn't got that 'OST' feel. I don't, but most here do.
What do you make of the 'Voxcetera' sequences in London Angel studios? They're very compatible with the London Decca feel you're referring to.
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Here's what Basil is talking about:
......
That's some pretty serious clipping, though I don't think most of it is that bad.
But it's the ART you're not accounting for.
I did a similar reading on an old Cool Edit Pro programme, and I may even have posted the pics somewhere, maybe the Rozsa forum? A guy who knows a lot there pointed out that I might need to widen my scale out vertically, and was possibly displaying in the wrong frequency range.
But again: this is surely down to Tadlow's decision to approximate in some ways the original OST. People DO complain if that isn't evoked in some way, and for some reason Quo Vadis? is one they're particularly touchy about.
So, had they not clipped the marches somebody would have said, 'Oh, it's too smooth'. See what 'Marcus Vinicius' says above about 'good harsh'. I personally think Rozsa should have been sensible, and recorded his 1951 marches indoors like everything else, but he did it that way, and that's what people now know. The 'harshness' is deliberate, so go easy on James and crew. They can't please everyone, but they did as good a compromise as they could with the sound on those marches, and they do sound good anyhow.
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