The cover of our recording of Kubelik conducting the VPO in the New World Symphony is – mysteriously – a painting of Weymouth Bay by Gainsborough; however the record sticks, so no good. To make up for the Debussy Nocturnes that also stuck, I found another LP of the Nocturnes coupled with Ravel’s second Daphnis and Chloe suite, with Abbado and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
The symphony cycle continues with two more discs of Mozart conducted by Neville Marriner and James Conlon, and Beethoven 7 with Colin Davis and the LSO.
Finally a couple of Supraphons of piano music: Klánská playing Janacek’s ‘On the overgrown path’ (sic) and a live recital of Ivan Moravec playing music by Suk, Smetana and Oldrich Korte (of whom I hadn’t previously heard).
Meanwhile, a really irritating glitch in RealPlayer. Polderbits’ track splitting is far from perfect (I’ll write in more detail some other time about this) and it was only when I played a CD over that I realised the final track, a short Etude by Scriabin, had been truncated by the splitter so that the final chord was cut short. Accordingly I went back to the original transcript, divided it again, manually corrected the truncation and wrote the full-length track back to the directory with the other tracks from that LP. I burnt the CD again and to my puzzlement the track was still truncated, though in a fractionally different place. I got to the bottom of this. It seems that RealPlayer works out the length of each file of music it is told about, and never revises the length even when the file is overwritten. It was convinced that the Scriabin prelude was 2 minutes 58 seconds long, and nothing would persuade it otherwise. The only thing for it is to give the re-recorded track a different name rather than overwriting the other. So I’ll have to burn the CD a third time to get the Etude entire. And I don’t even LIKE Scriabin….