In my effort to improve the string sounds of my rendition of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No.1, I have now added additional string layers to the 1st and 2nd movement. The first movement only has one new additional layer per string group, providing a more punchy attack, whereas for the 2nd movement I have added two layers per string group: one with more attack, the other with more smooth sustain. The results are now online on the VPO website on the pages for the first movement and the second movement.
There is a slight inaudible (at least I think so) clipping in these renditions, due to the increased overall loudness, which I need to fix in an upcoming version.
Next will be the 3rd movement, then all parts of Symphony No.1 will have improved string sound. I will then go through a final round of checks and edits, to release the album "From the Life of a Lonely One" in time for the 100th anniversary commemoration of Gustav Mahler's death on 18.May 1911.
And for that date I also plan a special rendition of a single movement from his symphonies, which I am not yet revealing - will be a surprise.
Showing posts with label 2nd movement. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2nd movement. Show all posts
Thursday, 7 April 2011
Thursday, 17 February 2011
New Renditions of Mahler: 2nd and 3rd Movement from Symphony No.1
These past few days (evenings) I have been busy revising my recordings of Mahler's Symphony No.1. I want to finalise that recording and create a separate album for it, as a special edition for the Mahler Year. I have started with the 3rd movement, "Hunter's Funeral". There had been some technical problems with my PC MAESTRO-2: this particular file of the 3rd movement caused some stutter, due to some memory problems. I had to copy track by track into a new Sonar file in order to get rid of the problem. Then I still encountered problems: Sonar would suddenly crash at particular locations in the file - when a lot of instruments were simultaneously playing. I did then upgrade to the latest version of Asio4All, and after a while of tinkering I finally got everything working again properly.
The new version of the 3rd movement has only slight changes: some instrument attacks have been adjusted, to properly differentiate between marcato/staccato/legato, a few tempo changes to correct tiny imbalances within measures, and some new expression curves for selected instruments in a few locations.
The same overhaul was done with the 2nd movement. This movement has the inherent problem that I had recorded in in free-style and only later added the tempo quantisation. This has still the effect that not all instrument tracks appear properly synchronised: some quantisation that I did in some tracks in order to properly adhere to tempo and metric had the effect of slightly disrupting the consistent structure, and I will still have to fix that. I corrected a few errors and added some instruments which I had missed in the earlier rendition.
When I compared now the final audio recordings of the new with the previous versions, I hardly can note the difference - it is very subtle.
Here are the new versions, together with all the previous renditions of these movements:
2nd movement
3rd movement
Maybe you can hear the differences to the previous versions?
The new version of the 3rd movement has only slight changes: some instrument attacks have been adjusted, to properly differentiate between marcato/staccato/legato, a few tempo changes to correct tiny imbalances within measures, and some new expression curves for selected instruments in a few locations.
The same overhaul was done with the 2nd movement. This movement has the inherent problem that I had recorded in in free-style and only later added the tempo quantisation. This has still the effect that not all instrument tracks appear properly synchronised: some quantisation that I did in some tracks in order to properly adhere to tempo and metric had the effect of slightly disrupting the consistent structure, and I will still have to fix that. I corrected a few errors and added some instruments which I had missed in the earlier rendition.
When I compared now the final audio recordings of the new with the previous versions, I hardly can note the difference - it is very subtle.
Here are the new versions, together with all the previous renditions of these movements:
2nd movement
3rd movement
Maybe you can hear the differences to the previous versions?
Friday, 28 May 2010
Mahler: Symphony No.1, 2nd Movement
The recording of the second movement of this symphony is now complete. I did not have much opportunity to work on it during the past weeks, but once I started the remaining work, it went quite fast. The recordings - the very latest one plus the earlier partial recordings - are at www.virtualphilharmonic.co.uk/Mahler_S1M2.php.
The next tasks are to create recordings of the first and the forth movement - these are gigantic works, and I am quite sure that I will not be able to complete these recordings before 7.July, Mahler's 150th birthday... pity.
I also ordered the score of the lost movement "Blumine", which had originally been a part of this Symphony. That should be a relatively quick task to do, since it is a slow movement; but I never heard it nor have I seen the score... so this has some uncertainty.
On my site about Mahler and his First Symphony I mentioned the programmatic content that was originally handed out as program note for the performance. There were very nice titles, and I am going to adapt them. This second movement will hereby be known as "Set with full sails", indicating an optimistic start into the future. The whole symphony will be entitled as "From the life of a lonely one". That is so much more fitting than "Symphony No.1, D major". I think the classic music community has gotten used over the years to those non-descript titles of orchestra works, which really do not do any justice to the wonderful music they are supposed to describe. Also, I will break with the tradition of using the tempo instructions as titles for symphony movements: why should a work be entitled "Largo" or "Presto"? This is only intended for the conductor and for the orchestra players, so that they know how fast to play. These are completely inappropriate titles... and I intend to use different ones. Fortunately, Mahlers "Song of the Earth" does have very descriptive titles - it appears that at the end of his life he returned to using programmatic titles, which convey at least a glimpse of the context in which the music was envisioned.
The next tasks are to create recordings of the first and the forth movement - these are gigantic works, and I am quite sure that I will not be able to complete these recordings before 7.July, Mahler's 150th birthday... pity.
I also ordered the score of the lost movement "Blumine", which had originally been a part of this Symphony. That should be a relatively quick task to do, since it is a slow movement; but I never heard it nor have I seen the score... so this has some uncertainty.
On my site about Mahler and his First Symphony I mentioned the programmatic content that was originally handed out as program note for the performance. There were very nice titles, and I am going to adapt them. This second movement will hereby be known as "Set with full sails", indicating an optimistic start into the future. The whole symphony will be entitled as "From the life of a lonely one". That is so much more fitting than "Symphony No.1, D major". I think the classic music community has gotten used over the years to those non-descript titles of orchestra works, which really do not do any justice to the wonderful music they are supposed to describe. Also, I will break with the tradition of using the tempo instructions as titles for symphony movements: why should a work be entitled "Largo" or "Presto"? This is only intended for the conductor and for the orchestra players, so that they know how fast to play. These are completely inappropriate titles... and I intend to use different ones. Fortunately, Mahlers "Song of the Earth" does have very descriptive titles - it appears that at the end of his life he returned to using programmatic titles, which convey at least a glimpse of the context in which the music was envisioned.
Monday, 26 April 2010
Update of Website
In the past days I updated/upgraded the website of the Virtual Philharmonic Orchestra: a consistent set of icons was designed, and several PHP automation scripts were included to read the ID3 tags. For this I found the great getID3().php script, which allows to read the tags in all kinds of media files. In my site the use of this PHP automation required a consistent use of filenames; therefore I had to rename a whole set of WMA files for consistency. I could have used a MySQL database for this task, to achieve a more abstract separation of content description from the file name, but I did not want to go through the hassle of setting this up.
I also added a new partial recording: the first third of the 2nd movement from Mahler's Symphony No.1. It is so far up to the beginning of the Trio. A really marvellous work. Sounding deceivingly simple in the orchestra recordings, but it took quite a while to get these first 4 minutes recorded.
I also added a new partial recording: the first third of the 2nd movement from Mahler's Symphony No.1. It is so far up to the beginning of the Trio. A really marvellous work. Sounding deceivingly simple in the orchestra recordings, but it took quite a while to get these first 4 minutes recorded.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)