Scheherazade

[Feanor]

Listening to it today, I felt I had to tell people about one of my favorite recordings from sonic perspective. The music is great too. I'm referring to Scheherazade by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, performed by José Serebrier and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. This is a Reference Recording, RR089, in stereo and HDCD encoded.

Scheherazade is something of a classical cliché being staple fare on easy-listening classical radio. But so what, eh? It is delightful as well as accessable piece of music. The Serebrier performance is pleasantly atmospheric without being florid or overstated in the way that romantic pieces can be performed. And the sound -- WOW!! -- for 2 channel sound, no recording I own comes as closer to reproducing a live, concert hall ambience. I played the piece through my Assembage DAC 1.5 which has HDCD decoding; the unit has good detail and air, still a tad bright but much less so since I had it modified by Parts Connexion with high grade op-amps.

For comparison I played my other version of Scheherazade by Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony, a vintage recording remastered on SACD by RCA Living Stereo. I played it on my Sony CE775 in 2 channel DSD. A very good sound too, but not close to the realism of the Reference version. That performance is also very good it seems to me, however a bit more "dramatic" and a tad lush but less atmospheric by comparision.
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