One of my favorite LPs of classical music is Carmen Suites, Georges Bizet, Rodion Shchedrin, The Strings' Group of the USSR Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra, Gennadi Rozhdestvensky conducting, Melodiya C 01659-60 (1968).
The Carmen Suite is a one-act ballet created in 1967 by Cuban choreographer Alberto Alonso to music by Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin. Shchedrin composed the music for his wife, the renowned ballerina Maya Plisetskaya of the Bolshoi Theatre. The ballet premiered on April 20, 1967, at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow and was subsequently recorded by Igor Veprintsev for the Melodiya record label.
The Carmen Suite ballet recounts the tale of the Carmen opera, where a gypsy woman named Carmen seduces a soldier named Don José. As their relationship evolves from infatuation to passion, Carmen grows weary of Don José and becomes attracted to the charismatic bullfighter Escamillo. Don José, consumed by jealousy, ultimately murders Carmen, ending the relationship in a state of tragic despair.
Shchedrin arranged the Carmen Suite for strings and percussion to give this performance its unique feel, and the music is full of dramatic feeling due to its vibrant melodies, rhythms, and instrumental colors, expressing the fiery range of emotions that Carmen and Don José experienced during their relationship.
The dynamic contrasts were very clearly defined and articulate with the M8 RIAA/AN-S8L SUT. The big dynamic swings sounded effortless and powerful. The enhanced articulation of dynamic contrasts across the entire dynamic spectrum made the softer dynamics of melodies and the middling dynamics of rhythm feel more pronounced. This dynamic refinement across variations in loudness provided me with a stronger emotional connection to the music during listening.
In the lower frequencies, I heard natural levels of warmth, but with enhanced resolution, which lent a sense of live-like naturalness and greater in-room presence to the music.
That clarity and resolution also extended up into the midrange, giving bass and stringed instruments more resolved timbral textures, with a beautiful resolution of harmonics.
In the upper midrange, I heard utterly natural-sounding timbre of instruments and percussion, with realistically snappy attacks on percussion, and never even the slightest hint of anything that could cause listening fatigue.
The M8 RIAA/AN-S8L SUT imbued faster tempos with intense feelings of excitement and exhilaration, while slower tempos evoked reflection or even sadness. The passages with softer dynamics conveyed intimacy, while louder dynamic swings expressed both intensity and power, and conveyed the fiery passion of their relationship, while the strings and percussion suggested urgency as the relationship failed.
As the music flows along, the M8 RIAA/AN-S8L SUT clearly showed how Shchedrin used skillful transitions of tone color and varied dynamics to enhance the musical narrative, interspersing emotional feelings of beauty, serenity, gaiety, and dreaminess with shock, tension, exhilaration.
The M8 RIAA/AN-S8L SUT made their infatuation more beautiful, the passion more fiery, the jealousy more biting, the despair lingered in the air more, and the workup to murder was more violent, with the resulting tragedy more consuming.
I could feel all those emotions in the performance, more through the M8 RIAA/AN-S8L SUT pairing than any other phono preamplification in my experience, and my emotional response was intensified in depth and breadth as a result. More of the musical artistry of the performance comes through, more of the emotional intensity of the performance comes through. The musicians are more there, more flesh and blood in their tangible presence, and more human and creative in their musicianship.
The M8 RIAA/AN-S8L SUT was superb in telling this story, fleshing it out, filling it with meaning, and bringing out the artistry of Shchedrin's composing.
I was just hearing and feeling more, lots more of everything, through the M8 RIAA/AN-S8/L SUT pairing. It pushes the performance past the point of mere ultra-fi sound quality, into a rarified realm of intense emotional-fidelity, making me realize what an impressive work of audio art the M8 RIAA/AN-S8/L SUT truly is.
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