"Everything I have written until now, and which unfortunately you have printed, can be destroyed. My collected works begin with Carmina Burana", Carl Orff said to his publisher in 1937 after a very successful premiere.
Carmina Burana's striking contrast from piano to immediate fortissimo and the modern, percussive orchestration in a medieval musical style has always fascinated the audience. I do not often listen to works that include singing because I am a rather instrument oriented person, but Carmina Burana is a nice exception. The presence of a choir and singers means an even greater challenge for the engineer than that which a big orchestra alone already poses. I had owned a Seiji Ozawa record with the Berliner Philharmoniker for a long time without being very critical about the audio quality. But in fact, it was not so easy to find a better recording. The Telarc/Shaw and the Chandos/Hickox recordings are way too dull and the Warner/Rattle has a strangely exaggerated percussion. The Philips/Ozawa did hold up well against all the others presented here, until I found the Warner recording with Franz Welser-Möst which is clearly a step up even against those which are of a higher resolution.
The records I compared:
Uncompressed WAV in original kHz and bit-depth of the records, peak normalized *
*Audio © notice: Copyright of the audio excerpts from the respective records lie with the individual record labels. US, UK, EU and CH copyright laws allow short excerpts or citation as fair dealing with a copyrighted work for the purpose of criticism or review.
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I really hope you can get all the samples online again, it was really helpful.
I am missing the sound samples you had on every record, also the ones to compare.
Sorry, John. I got insecure about the usage rights in such a case, because lawyers and authors cooperatives didn't dare to give a clear statement. It should be a sure case of citation right, but copyright got so corrupted, it seems no one really knows anything for sure anymore. In the meantime I decided to take offline those samples that are just for comparison.