I've been neglecting the music side of things here over the past year. I've been listening to the fine restorationist, conservator of early recordings Ward Marston's Youtubes and have been absolutely fascinated. This one gives you a good example of how much musical information there is in even the early low-tech recordings. When he demonstrates the problems involved with finding the right needle and playback speed to get that information back it's pretty surprising how much of a difference that makes. When he lets us hear what a repressing of the original master on vinyl instead of "shellac" is like was especially surprising. A lot of what I thought of the early recordings was clearly wrong, some of that was due to bad or incompetent re-recording of those. I'd already had my mind changed that by the Prima Voce recordings issued by Nimbus, some of which were a revelation. I had a link, somewhere, once, that showed the enormous wooden horn they played discs back into a concert hall to make those recordings but I don't have time to look for it again.
One of the things I've learned is that some of those I'd never heard of before were spectacularly good singers. Probably the one who I was most astonished to hear was one I'd never heard of before, Celestina Boninsegna who was, apparently, famous for how well her voice recorded with the earliest non-electrical recording technology Here she is singing Tacia la Notte Placida by Verdi in 1905.
From what I read, she was well regarded but wasn't considered as good on stage as some of the other stars of her day. She sounds pretty amazing to me.
Got to go work in the greenhouse. Used to be a piano teacher, now I'm a drudge.
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