Soundlab Audiophile G9-7c: a 30-year odyssey fulfilled

[godofwealth]

Finally we turn to listen to the string quartets of another Polish composer, Bela Bartok, whose six quartets are adjudged by many to be the greatest contribution in this medium since the late quartets of Beethoven. We are listening to the performance by Emerson string quartets recorded by DG. The Emerson quartet made a habit of playing all six quartets live without a break. Two and a half hours of pure abstract music without interruption. Must be a challenge yet they routinely sold out their concerts.

One cannot listen to music of this rarefied air as one would say the tunes of Taylor Swift. There’s no obvious bouncy rythm or catchy lyrics. This is like modern art: you need to prep mentally to listen to the Bartok quarters as if you’re studying for the bar examination or a PhD defense in quantum mechanics. The Emerson don’t play this in numerical order. They play the first quartet, composed in 1908, then jump to the third composed in 1927, then to the fifth composed in 1934, then it’s back to the second quartet composed in 1914-15, then to the fourth composed in 1928 and finally the sixth composed in 1939.

Bartok took many years composing his six quartets and one can and should spend a lifetime listening to them. There are no easy ways to understand Bartok. Euclid, the famous geometer, admonished one of his student from nobility by telling him there’s no royal road to learning geometry. Just because you are a king doesn’t make it easier to prove theorems in geometry. Similarly the Bartok quartets are things you slowly learn to appreciate by listening to them often and thinking about them.

The Emerson quartet play these quartets with a deep passion. The DG recording is serviceable. They are not an audiophile label but here they provide a reasonable recording. Highly recommended to music lovers who want an education in musical highbrow art, not pop 20.

The big SL’s allow you to enjoy the music, although I use the word “enjoy” metaphorically. One does not enjoy Bartok. One experiences them in the same way one experiences the joy of pure mathematics or modern art or great poetry.

 

[godofwealth]

I just heard earlier this week a lovely live concert featuring three oboists and a piano in Carmel Valley. When you listen to a live oboe in a chamber music hall, it’s a bit of a shock because the instrument sounds so loud. In a concert hall, an oboe is the foundation of every orchestra as they tune to its pitch. When you see an oboist in action, you see how analog an instrument it is. Oboists make their own reeds from pieces of wood. It’s a practice dating back centuries and was likely the same in Vivaldi’s day. You hear the blowing and the puff of wind, and all such nuances are missing in any recording. The oboist typically has to ensure humidity doesn’t affect the sound. So they insert a little cleaning rod into the oboe attached by a string and pull it out the other end. It’s remarkable in 2025 in the age of cloud computing and AI to see an old fashioned musical instrument that has virtually remained the same for several hundred years. Of course, the reason is the sound. An oboe live sounds so rich and resonant, and recordings are no match for the live sound of an oboe.

In celebration of that concert, we are listening to oboe concertos today on my usual ARC-Lampi-SL system. First up is a lovely modernized recording of Vivaldi oboe concertos. Burkhard Glaetzner has a warm luscious tone and the strings of the Neues Bachisches collegium are rich and resonantly recorded. It’s not the sound that Vivaldi himself would have recognized, but the results are so gratifying, like eating a molten chocolate for dessert.

 

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Vivaldi composed his oboe concertos in the 1740s. Now we step further back in time and listen to Bach’s oboe concertos, composed 30 years earlier roughly. Celine Moinet performs a more historically accurate performance with original instruments. The sound is leaner and sharper and the oboe is still gorgeous sounding. One sees why so many composers wrote pieces for the oboe. It has a mournful sound full of melancholy. Bach here write some of his most melodious music, and I suspect he was just reusing the tunes from his violin concertos.

 

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We move to the 20th century to listen to the Poulenc oboe sonata composed in 1962, one of the pieces played at the live concert I heard earlier this week in Carmel Valley. Poulenc has a tongue-in-cheek humor to all his pieces. He’s been described as a “mock Mozart”, but that epithet scarcely does justice to his brilliance as a composer. This high resolution 24-bit 192khz of his oboe sonata sounds nice indeed, but once you’ve heard this performed live, recordings feel like a pale imitation of reality, in the sense that no one would mistake a high resolution digital image for the actual scene.

 

[godofwealth]

This program describes the oboe pieces I heard in the live concert on Tuesday. These are relatively rare pieces. The three world-class oboists were doing a master class for young oboists from around the world who flew into town for a week to learn from these virtuosos.

 

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We are listening to another of the pieces performed live, Jean Coulthard’s oboe sonata composed in 1947. She was a Canadian composer who studied with Ralph Vaughan Williams in England. This album collects oboe music written by Canadian composers. It’s a lovely piece that needs to be heard more often. Again, the live concert sounded far better than this recording!

 

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Now we are listening to a famous piece from Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin called Lensky’s aria, set to oboe and piano. Again, this was played at the live concert I heard on Tuesday in Carmel Valley. It’s a beautifully melodious piece as only Tchaikovsky could write.

 

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From the same album, we are now listening to Robert Schumann’s Three Romances for oboe and piano, composed in 1849. What gorgeous pieces these are, written by a genius at the height of his creative powers before sadly mental illness took him away. They show the absolutely lovely tone of the oboe in creating a melancholic mood. Haunting and sad.

 

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The Orlando Concert was one of Britain’s finest choral groups from 1988 till they disbanded in 2024. We are listening to their wonderful series of nine recordings of the fourteenth century French poet and composer Guillaume de Machaut who lived from 1300-1377. He was employed as court composer for 30 years by the king of Bohemia Jehan of Luxembourg who was killed heroically in the Battle of Cre’cy in 1346. The Le Voir dit or Book of True Tales is a collection of love songs meant for the fairer sex. It supposedly describes his own love affair with a woman forty years younger to him.

Hyperion’s high res 24-bit 88.2 kHz recording is as always a model of natural sound. The four voices emerge with an uncommon purity with no brightness or simplicity on my SL G9-7c’s. The recording was made in the church of St. John the Baptist in Essex in 2012. Thanks to the wonders of streaming, we can listen to their wonderful series via Qobuz, all in high resolution.

 

[godofwealth]

From a long-dead fourteenth century composer, we move to a still-living 21st century composer, Arvo Part, my favorite modern composer. We are listening to music he composed from 1990 onwards, very new in classical music terms. But listening to his music takes you back centuries for Part relies on traditional religious text and harmonies used in many choral music from the fourteenth century onwards. The composer was present at this Hyperion recording session, how cool is that. In typical Hyperion fashion, the recording is superb, and the full chorus sounds quite magnificent on my SL G9-7c.