the cosima era

[wagnerfan]

About ten years ago, Gebhardt issues a very interesting 12 CD set
called 100 Jahre Bayreuth auf Schallplatte which concentrated on the
very first singers at Bayreuth. The set has been OOP for some time and
is fetching in the neighborhood of 300.00 on the net. The set has now
been reissued on the Pan label called the Cosima Era with exactly the
same contents - I think the booklet may be different though it is
stocked with valuable info about the singing style back then the
singers. Worth hearing. I got mine through Amazon.de.

Wagner fan

[jobr...@kc.rr.com]

Sounds like the original booklet. I bought the original when it came out and have enjoyed the set greatly over the years. The singing style, at least to my ears, was very different. I never understood the "Bayreuth bark" critique until I heard these records. Ernst Kraus and T. Bertram especially. The book warns about alcohol's toll on Bertram's voice in his later recordings.Enjoy

[Mike Scott Rohan]

Have baulked at getting this set, but I've heard a few of the early recordings elsewhere. I suspect their "bark" may be worse than it actually was. If I remember rightly, these singers were recorded not in a purpose-built studio, but in some sort of hall, without the immense built-in acoustic horns they then used. Even in studios, singers had to make a hellish amount of noise just to register on the old recorders; Gerald Moore describes trying to accompany a singer when all he could see was a pair of buttocks protruding from the mouth of the horn. And that was some two decades of improvement after the earliest Bayreuth recordings. So perhaps those singers were just "barking" for the recording -- at least to that extent.

Cheers,

Mike

[jobr...@kc.rr.com]

The recordings are remastered and the results are some what between the way Marston does things and the way Nimbus did things. Most transfers are very clean (so I can't say what might be missing, if anything)and the echo chamber effect is not distracting. Christian Zwarg of True Sound Transfers did the remastering and if you like his work, well, there is your answer.
As to the "bark", I can fully understand what Mr. Moore was saying. However, the singers Cosima like, do sound different than some of, even their contemporaries
I hope this helps in your decision.

[Mike Scott Rohan]

On Friday, July 5, 2013 11:01:48 PM UTC+1, jobr...@kc.rr.com wrote:

> The recordings are remastered and the results are some what between the way Marston does things and the way Nimbus did things. Most transfers are very clean (so I can't say what might be missing, if anything)and the echo chamber effect is not distracting. Christian Zwarg of True Sound Transfers did the remastering and if you like his work, well, there is your answer.
>
> As to the "bark", I can fully understand what Mr. Moore was saying. However, the singers Cosima like, do sound different than some of, even their contemporaries
>
> I hope this helps in your decision.

Thanks, I'll be considering it. At this level the remastering is often fairly moot, anyhow, given basic competence; it's in later stuff -- Christoff's early recordings, for example -- that I find real differences, and Nimbus in particular a bit lean-sounding. Against that, Nimbus often sourced their 78s from an excellent singer-collector, Norman White (if I remember correctly, the first Donner I ever saw), whose copies tended to be excellent, so that gave them some advantage in non-master recordings.

But what really concerns me is the artificiality of the original early acoustic recording conditions, which is seldom allowed for in judging an artist. I think it may have intensified the Bark, and perhaps other mannerisms also. When a whole new design of horn-amplified violin had to be made to register, what hope for poor singers?

Cheers,

Mike