This is excellent. Released last week.
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I’ve been following the conversations on Roon and metadata.
I’ve noticed over the last few months that Roon has altered the way it presents metadata on classical “artists”. This is annoying if you scrobble to last.fm as it messes up your listening history.
In the example below you can see that Roon now uses a comma to separate orchestra, conductor and soloist. The file information (from Qobuz in my example) is in the more usual format of xxx / yyy / zzz. I’ve have to keep watch and manually edit each time I find it. I know I could set Roon to always prefer file but in the past Roon data was slightly better.
you might find this post interesting:
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Thank you, Andreas, for pointing out this wonderful recording. What I love about this is its splendid integration of a a different branch of the musical tree with apparently Western music. This is fresh, poignant and deeply moving. Incredible performances by Rachel Pine, Anthony McGill, Marin Alsop/ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and the sound engineers (incredible balance between orchestra/soloists). I’m looking forward to exploring more work by this remarkable composer. What a treat!
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Thats’ what I did, and the first stop was here; this is an altogether remarkable album of avantgarde music… and it was my first encounter with this Texan string quartet and their discography…
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Schubert’s D 667 Piano Quintet ‘The Trout’ is another of those very popular classical compositions with a vast recorded discography. It seems to me impossible to single out one ‘best’ or preferred interpretation, but I can point to this rather recent album from 2018, with Nathanaël Gouin taking on the piano part, and some well-known and respected players the string parts. The cellist Astrig Siranossian is rather popular, and Marie Chilemme since 2017 has been the violist of Quatuor Ébène…
Nathanaël Gouin last month released his most recent album, with a great take on Rachmaninov’s Paganini Rhapsody… Recommended!
I like this rather delicate, articulate and intimate, but not very muscular playing; it’s chamber music, after all… And Evidence support the musicians with excellent recorded sound…
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Quoting the post pointed to above, “So if deep, rich, consistently formatted classical metadata standards have been available for nearly 20 years, why is most classical metadata still so poor? Because the labels, by and large, have not bothered to implement the standards many of them helped develop”
You’ve obviously given more thought to this than the rest of us. Aside from the problem you mention above, there is the additional one of the pre-streaming back recording catologs.
Only recently in the history of music performance and recording has streaming become the predominant listening mode. There are growing incentives for those doing recording to make discovery and refinding specific recordings on streaming services possible, but they are not strong from a business perspective. I expect that staffing for meta data assignment is either non-existent or a job that falls to “someone” with another job title or two or five.
@mSpot has it right that there is no industry-wide acknowledged way of doing this (as with ISO approaches, where the stakes/economic consequences are much greater). The TLS you and others advocate might be the answer, but even with this and rigid adherence to it by all those inputting recordings into the recording sea, who funds the back-catalogs?
Where does this leave us? About where we are, which is far ahead of where we’d have been without software, such as, by my reckoning, industry-leading Roon, doing a remarkable job, given the mess meta data are in. It’s an amazing, even historic time to enjoy classical (and other wonderful) music. Never been better and still improving!
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This is a lovely release.
I love the Bavouzet & Uchida Debussy and the Mompou recordings!
Haven’t heard the Osborne yet but he is stellar. I was disappointed by the Aimard Debussy etudes (except for Pour les huit doigts and Pour les degrés chromatiques) but perhaps I should listen again. I overall prefer the Decca Roge recordings to the Onyx.
Have you tried Boffard (Harmonia Mundi), and Ju-Ying Song (Pro Piano)? (Not streamable as far as I can see.)
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so long as Roon can match to a recording from a streaming catalog, it should be able to provide the normalized metadata from its own database.
Roon could implement this solution independent of what it receives from Tidal/Qobuz.
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Unfortunately, I think you are very correct. It’s sad that the best solution for finding classical artists, albums, labels is a well groomed Roon library.
Recordings to look for and forward to. Thank you.
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“implement” is the key term. You and Roon both know that to implement “this solution” is not cost or time-free. In fact, it seems, on the face of it, an enormous undertaking, or am I missing something (entirely likely)?
May also be good to hear what everyone does to try and find a recommended recording of a piece. I really like the BBC Radio 3 Building a Library approach, as you hear the reasoning. I don’t always agree, but it sure finds some hidden gems.
I still keep my guides, including the Gramophone equivalent, because search anywhere is very poor now. The Gramophone reviews archive is really chaotic.
One resource is the Presto Classical site, which tends to gather reviews on key recordings, but not always.
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Many will have their favorite interpretation of Schubert’s most famous song cycle; this is mine… Thomas Quasthoff’s bass-baritone is beautiful and he sings with absolute emotional involvement. Charles Spencer’s piano accompaniment is perfect…
What’s your favorite Winterreise?
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Thanks for the idea and the recommendation. Indeed, a very beautifully dark baritone by Quasthoff.
I have a slightly different take on Winterreise preferring a more natural, less exalted type of singing. So all versions containing operatic baritone (Quasthoff), overly dramatic pronunciation (Fischer-Dieskau) or Heldentenor-like showcasing (Schreier) are not my cup of tea. Being familiar with both the baritone and the tenor version I do like voices the most who are something in between.
Hermann Prey´s timbre is perfect IMHO but his earlier recording (Sawallisch) is a bit lame and the second one (Bianconi) he sounds a bit too mature and not as precise in declamation. I do like the theatrical take by Christoph Berner and Werner Güra as well but it is a bit too dramatic and extreme in dynamics at times. Too many elements of an Evangelista and some radio play, if you want.
So my favorite baritone recording might be an unusual choice, very natural singing: Olaf Bär
Among the tenors I opt for Christoph Prégardien being aware that he sounds also a bit mature but the way he is bringing every detail of these songs emotional to life together with Michael Gees is IMHO the best one:
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Haven’t listened to this recording. thanks for the recommendation!
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Yeah, I’ve heard good things about Primephonic, but they were eventually bought out by Apple and some of Primephonics’ good aspects migrated into Apple Music Classical (which isn’t horrible). Otherwise, I think Roon is as good as its going to get.
It would be great if Roon had a really efficient metadata modifying feature. Going in track by track is really cumbersome. If the tracks are your own, you can use another piece of software to adjust the metadata, but Roon doesn’t always properly reflect the changes made.