[SACD-R][OF] Julian Bream - Popular Classics For Spanish Guitar - 2007 (Classical, Instrumental Music)

Julian Bream performs Popular Classics for Spanish Guitar including Tipico Brasileiro & Suite Espanola, Op 47. The mastery of guitarist Julian Bream is perhaps at its best in Spanish music, & this legendary recording – featuring some of the most popular works ever written for the guitar – gains a new luster & brilliance in its new DSD remastering.
The RCA Living Stereo SACD remastering project is being handled by John Newton, Philip Nedel & Mark Donahue at Soundmirror Corporation in Boston. For the new Super Audio CDs, Soundmirror obtained the original analog master tapes for each album.
Amazon review:
Arguably the greatest classical guitar recording ever made, January 27, 2007
By Tom Poore (South Euclid, OH)
This review is from: Popular Classics for Spanish Guitar [Hybrid SACD] (Audio CD)
English guitarist Julian Bream has retired from the concert stage. But in his day, he was perhaps the greatest concert guitarist of the 20th century. This is a remastered issue of his 1962 RCA recording. It captures the 29 year old artist in his prime, playing with a passion and flair that no one has surpassed. This CD reminds us of how, in the right hands, the guitar has a voice that no other instrument can match. Too often today the guitar is played as though it’s a second rate piano, eschewing the supple shaping of sound for which stringed instruments are uniquely suited. Bream in this recording will have none of this. His approach is unabashedly sensual and prismatic.
Audiophiles may quibble over whether the sound of this 2006 reissue improves on the now deleted 1997 CD reissue. On the plus side, edits are cleaner–for example, in the earlier release there’s an obvious edit at the 2:01 mark of Chôro No. 1 that’s inaudible in this new CD. This latest remastering, however, has a slightly plummier sound that’s not always suited to Bream’s incisive playing. Asturias, for example, looses some of its bite compared to the leaner sound of the old CD. Quibbles aside, this is arguably the greatest single classical guitar recording ever made. While other recordings can claim more historical significance–for example, those that premiere important new works–none before or since has better showcased guitar playing at its absolute best.
http://www.sa-cd.net/showtitle/4326
AUDAD review:
Whoops, I just referred in my last Living Stereo SACD review to the increased time length of around 70 minutes. Not in this case. It is unfortunate, therefore, that two of the guitar pieces are excerpted when there is plenty of time available. But there wasn’t back in 1962 and in the LP era 42 minutes was about it, even for solo guitar.
This is nevertheless a legendary recording of Spanish guitar music by one of the masters of both that instrument and of the lute. The works are some of the best-known and most popular for the classical guitar and Bream breathes wonderful life into them. The three Villa-Lobos pieces are to my thinking the standouts of the album – they seem to fit the instrument so perfectly (even though they don’t quite fit the theme of Spanish composers).
The tremendous resolution of the new DSD remastering brings out not only the warm and wide-range sound of the guitar, but also the whistling on the strings and other noises to be expected in most classical guitar performances – sometimes to a nearly annoying degree. There is also a low hiss thruout the disc – the sort of thing usually covered up by other vinyl surface noises but now quite audible. It is claimed that no EQ or noise reduction is done on the original tapes. Sony BMG persists in calling the Living Stereo recordings made originally only in two channels “Multichannel.” Sorry, but that term normally refers to more than two channels. Thus, the Stereo layer and the Multichannel layer on this disc are perfectly identical, which seems wasteful and confusing. It would have been nice to offer some sort of derived ambiance on the surround channels in the Multichannel option – as several other labels have done, but evidently that doesn’t fit BMG’s purist approach on this series, and I suppose the feeling is “Why risk it?” when this is currently the most successful classical CD reissue series.