FOREIGN ACCENTS

Thanks to Denon, the major corporate arm of Nippon Columbia in Japan, I have just emerged from a Mahler marathon--more of Gustav Mahler's music than I have heard in all the rest of a longish musical life, and this in no more than a few days. What an experience! Denon recently completed digital recordings of all nine plus Mahler symphonies (the Tenth was unfinished), and I attended the final climactic recording session and concert of Symphony No. 8, the "Symphony of a Thousand," which brought together, if not 1,000, no fewer than 700 performers in a stunning new German concert hall. I'm still in a daze and Mahler oozes out of my ears.

There was first the music itself, vast stretches of it, almost hypnotic, demanding hours of attention from me before I even started for the big event in Germany. The stuff grabs you. It grows on you. After an unbroken evening of it you are shaken, but hooked.

As a sort of preparatory training course, Denon sent me the first four symphonies, filling six very long CD sides and almost that many evenings of listening. I played every note and particularly fell for the odd-numbered symphonies, Nos. 1 and 3 (and, later, No. 5), which I played twice through.

Some indoctrination! It was a memorable experience; of my own free will I would never have gotten around to so much Mahler.

The Denon performers were the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra and numerous soloists, massed choruses, remote brass bands, all under the direction of Eliahu Inbal, the orchestra's regular conductor. They had performed a complete Mahler cycle only a few years back and have the stuff down cold, no matter how enormous the length. As a musician, I'd say these could be the definitive performances for our time, and Denon's the definitive recordings.

Curiously, these huge symphonies make splendid recording material-if you can do it right. The Mahler sonics are built upon the most astonishing orchestrations ever put down in a billion or so mere notes on paper. The climaxes are overpowering but most of the music is not loud, though it is extremely transparent; the enormous Mahler orchestra has been called "an orchestra of solos," with a sound that for all its vastness is as varied and as delicate as so much chamber music. Eliahu Inbal calls it fragile, so easily can it be thrown out of shape and balance in the playing. The stuff must be prepared with the most exact attention to detail, in spite of its huge dimensions.

And then there was the Denon PCM digital recording. Listening at home, I immediately found the CDs startlingly good (and this is not an ad). They have just the sort of transparent sound that the music needs, in a clear, easy ambience, never blurred, and with a faultless dynamic range from a whisper to a roar. This, of course, had to have come from a happy combination--clean electronics out of superb mikes, an obviously "right" hall, and a mike technique to do it justice. My training course at home, as you may gather, was plenty effective.

Then, in a few short hours, I was whisked straight to Frankfurt and the recording site. Thanks to a roaring tail wind, the flight arrived an hour and a half early. In no time--that is, at 6:30--I found myself in the Denon control room at the Alte Oper (Old Opera House), where the recordings were being made. And at 8 that evening we were in our seats at one of the most extraordinary concerts halls I ever hope to visit. New and absolutely enormous, with 1,060,000 cubic feet of air space, the Alte Oper was recently built inside the shell of an 1880s opera house bombed out in WWII (long dubbed "the most beautiful ruins in Germany"). In that hall I heard sonic effects I still cannot quite believe--more on this later. Ideal for Mahler, just as big as the composer's music and yet equally gracious and full of subtlety. At once I could recognize the ambience I had heard back home, for it seems to carry over into Denon's primarily "one-point" stereo. Strangely, as the music began, I sensed with some awe that the recordings did not sound like the hall--the hall sounded like the recordings, which is an altogether different matter. I pondered this for a long time and still find it fascinating.

After the simultaneous public concert and recording (some two hours of Mahler in absolute audience silence; I heard just one damaging cough the entire time), we were again whisked to a late party at the conductor's suburban home. Phew-how could I stay on my feet? But I did. Too much of interest to bother with sleep. We loaded into three taxis, the group of correspondents and Denon people (only two of us from the U.S.), and set off on the Autobahn, only to end up lost in a welter of small suburban villages with twisty, narrow streets. Our half hour of wandering was not in vain: We found the place and had a splendid little party, just us, champagne followed by a casual supper with two tables, one for those who could cope with English and the other for those who couldn't. Eliahu Inbal (who could) moved easily back and forth between the two; his wife, father-in-law, and daughter fetched the goodies from the kitchen. No fancy catering; just them, and the nicer for it.

This is a remarkable musician, this Inbal, authoritative and in his middle years still a rising star but, even so, modest and not in the least egocentric like so many celebrities. When we talked about Bruno Walter's definitive earlier recordings of Mahler (Walter was an associate of Mahler's), I got the feeling that Inbal was really listening. Rare! We will be hearing him and his Frankfurt orchestra in the U.S. about the time this is published.

By 2:30 a.m., when we got back to Frankfurt, I was a walking zombie. All this in one super-long day! But there was, mercifully, nothing on the agenda until the following noon in the control room, and so I recovered, behind the impenetrable curtains of my hotel room. This was no sightseeing trip.

That noon control-room conference was vital. At the concert the night before, we could see all sorts of microphones, dangling and on stands, but could not figure out how they were being used to capture the sound of such a mass of performers. The noon briefing session gave us an excellent account of Denon's procedures and the equipment in use, mainly from the attending Japanese engineer, Yukio Takahashi, and his co-engineer out of Denmark, Peter Willemoes, whose name will be familiar to many Audio readers.

Indeed, this get-together inside the control room, with the equipment right there on hand, was much like those that AES and other U.S. groups put on in various locations--a studio in L.A., a control room in New York, and so on--part lecture and part demo, with lots of free discussion, give and take. There was, however, one difference.

This event went its casual way in no fewer than six languages, shifting easily from one to another, as is the European practice. A matter of politeness.

A French correspondent asks a question, perhaps in English; the answer, courteously, is in French and that language continues for a while. Until, let's say, an Italian (we had one present) asks something in German, respectful of our hosts on this occasion; the answer will be in Italian. For us Americans, who never learn anybody else's language, this can be confusing. Nobody speaks his own tongue. It's all an important element of social grace and good manners, quite aside from communication, which is taken for granted.

So I must admit, with sorrow, that there were some minor details I missed in spite of close attention.

There is so much to relate concerning this quickie trip that I am going to have to write piecemeal; the Alte Oper concert hall is so unusual that I'll save it for another account. But I must get to the recording technique, which is of special interest in this magazine, needless to say.

What we had seen the previous night, as we filed into our reserved seats in row 8 of the Alte Oper, was a huge stage already filled with acres of musicians, and on a balcony above and around them, spread out in a vast C shape, chorus after chorus, hundreds of singers, each group in a different costume. They were to sing in "stereo," antiphonally, group by group.

There is no proscenium arch and no curtain in this hall; the stage is low and sticks out nearly to the middle of the hall, filling almost half the floor, an extension of a concert tradition that goes back centuries in Europe.

Hanging on fat pairs of cables, looping down and up, were no fewer than eight large mike systems, facing the various choirs in that square-horseshoe balcony-coincident stereo pairs, by the distant look of them ? Facing in three directions, 1801 Then I discovered more mikes, seven out front for seven solo singers, one more on a tall stand for an eighth soloist far away in the balcony. And still more--high, middle, low-for various orchestral instruments. Later, I found there was miking for a brass choir far up in the rear balcony. Some 22 separate pickups. So this was "one-point"? I was baffled.

It took me a while to notice still another pair of mikes, this one high in front of the orchestra, clearly two mikes in stereo, not quite coincident, a couple of feet apart, pointing horizontally like two thumbs stuck out in opposite directions. Could this be for overall ambience? The setup was beginning to look very much like those used back in the glorious '70s, the heyday of multi mike classical recording.

Not at all. What we learned in the control room was that those two high front mikes, near-coincident, were the main stereo mikes for the sound of 700 performers. It was essentially one point stereo, with a touch of phase difference added to improve the digital stereo ambience. Indeed, for the "smaller" Mahler symphonies (minus huge chorus et al.), these were virtually the exclusive source for the sound. In No. 4, with soprano solo, this was the only microphoning. Pure one-point. In No. 5, an absolutely stunning recording (I heard this one on my return home), all but a very small part of the symphony was done the same way, including the unusually powerful brass passages. Each of those two omnis, you should know, was a celebrated Brüel & Kjaer 4006, developed out of the earlier B & K series of precise measurement mikes. In my living room, I was bowled over by No. 5's brass sound; I have never heard very loud brass with that sort of clean, sharp edge and bite before, except, of course, in the concert hall.

Now for the payoff. All those other mikes were single cardioids, with heavy cables and weights to keep them in position. Every one was a new Brüel & Kjaer, first used, I think, in these recording sessions. They were a lightweight pencil type, and I saw the telltale re-entrant slots below the head as I held one in my hand. This mike, Denon says, matches the quality of the B & K omni, and the two blend remarkably well.

But how can they use 22 single, widely spaced "assistant microphones," as Denon delicately calls them-the equivalent of our accent mikes, sweeteners, and what have you-spaced out dozens, hundreds of feet from the main mikes? Ruinous phase problems! The close-up "assistant" sound would register before the distant pickup of the main stereo; the sound patterns would be dismally muddied.

Well, I hate to say so, but I think our Japanese friends have got the jump on us again: The Denon Digital Time Alignment Console, also developed mainly during this recording series, adds digital delay, for all those mikes, before mixing. But 22 of them? Only nine delay units are available at the moment, but Denon was ingenious again, in how they used them, with a simple idea that you and I might not have thought of.

The assistant mikes for the big Eighth Symphony were grouped by distance from the main stereo mikes, perhaps deliberately set up with a tape measure. There were three such groups, each with its particular distance, fed into three of the Denon delay modules (which look like so many Dolby plug-ins). Thus, you see, you have your cake. The assistant mikes can be used to sharpen and clarify the various sonic colors and yet, regardless of those vast spaces, be precisely and clearly blended in phase with the main stereo signal. For the ear, the combination is perceived as one sound, unmuddied and unambiguous.

Denon is very sparing in its use of these assistant mikes, however many there may be, and still thinks of its Mahler stereo as one-point. If you doubt this, just listen to Symphonies No. 5 and onward. In all these, if I am right, there are long passages where the assistant mikes are not used at all, and there is no audible indication of their circumspect "entrances." Just try to hear them. You won't.

More details of the Denon procedure will follow. And more about the Alte Oper, the hall where live music sounds like a recording-a good recording, of course.

(by: EDWARD TATNALL CANBY ; adapted from Audio magazine, Jan. 1987)

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