I know this is an old thread, but I'm still not completely happy with TP-006A, The Bruch Fantasia. This feeling was just reinforced by attending the first orchestral concert in the newly restored theatre/concert hall in Santa Barbara. The concert featured the Los Angeles Philharmonic with both a piano soloist and a soprano soloist and we in the audience quickly got to know what we've been missing for all these years. Last night we got to hear what a great orchestra should should sound like in our own local concert hall.
My reaction to the Bruch, on the other hand is that there might be a great orchestra on this record but I can't tell because it's missing, or at least it seems about 100 yards away from the soloist. But not during the whole recording as the orchestra appears to be only about 20 yards away during the Introduction. My Speaker's Corner re-issue of this record, on the other hand, has orchestra and soloist roughly in the same acoustic space through the whole piece, but the recording is more than a bit nasal. Moreover, whatever the source or the process, the Speaker's LP sound for Oistrakh makes him sound like about a 10th generation copy, so TP-006 smokes the LP as far as the soloist goes. But what happend to the orchestra?
Strangely, or perhaps not as these appear to be two separate dates, the Hindemith (TP-006B) is a very good 1960's recording. All the more frustrating as I prize Oistrakh's performance in the Bruch much more than Heifitz's, the great proponent of this work.
Does anybody else have a different experience of this title?