Cable Test II. - The story of the Naked King

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another cable test.
Or rather, not a test, but a report from the labyrinth in which many of us are stuck. Or rather, we live there, don't we?

I think it all started when Rudolf Radnai, 'Uncle Rudi', was sitting in my armchair a few years ago, and I could see it on his head, and I could feel it, and he told me that the sound was very-very good. And that he really didn't hear anything like it anywhere else, and that the audience that was using his cables was raised on completely different music, so he praised the sound, and I liked it.
Yes, I like it as much as you do, when I'm praised.
But.

Acoustic Zen Absolute

But, with a subtle 'but' in his voice, he looks at my thick speaker wire, but isn't it too thick, dear my friend Peter? All that plastic in it, and the large diameter, it's definitely not right, it's not technically correct, a much thinner diameter would handle ten times the current. Indeed, the pipe I use to water the garden is a little thinner, yes, there is a kilo of purple plastic insulation and a pile of Teflon to insulate the elementary fibres, which are not so thin themselves.
So that was my comment, in the end 'close your eyes and imagine that it's 1 mm only...'

Watering hose - OBI

Then many years went by, a lot of music went down, it was calm again, there was nothing worthwhile to listen to, 2 years ago, that dust was on the PowerR wires. The memories of a few speaker wires after the session, he gave me to listen to, thin ones, which are really good, he said, and after 5 minutes I took it out, it faded nicely. New records came gently, the system went a lot.

And recently, a phone call came in saying that now there's a breakthrough, that there's a new prototype, and that it's 'thick', and that it's going to rethink the thin-core theory... I didn't really want to give it a try, because several of us had booked: his speakercables as phenomenal value for money, but it just didn't break into the upper caste here, no matter how much he wanted. I've had at least five trials, all in vain and with no chance. It seems the quality of materials, or the technological advantage of the big cable manufacturers, is simply irrecoverable.

Stealth V16

And then somehow I had it in my hand. 'Thick' is a gross exaggeration, because the outer plastic stocking is about 2 mm thick, but he said that in his coordinate system this is 'thick wire', because there are not 128 Litze fibres in 1 mm, but about half a dozen, and the thickness is really of a different order of magnitude.

I put it in, nothing surprising at first, in fact, the basic tone is almost similar to Zen, nice musicality, this Monteverdi SACD is very good, very good bass, a little pale but -.

This is the 'but', this is where the trouble always starts. Always. Because I simply heard more colour at times, more music coming off, flawless midrange, but a kind of covered up sound... even if the bass, it was extremely engaging, well articulated, and specifically, more bass in quantity, there was nothing to embellish. But with me, the room is very good, with a rare lucky corner placement and an ultra-light resonant stand, Zen also produced beautiful and sufficient bass always.Then I took it out, and yes, Zen, it's a really good cable, everything fell back into place, I liked the sound again.
But.
It wasn't the exhale of 'finally home'. Tiny achey memory-crumbs came, tones that were now hidden, near-sub chords, drums that were now just 'just plain good' bass... The first time I wondered a little if there might be some spare still lurking in the system, and right around here somewhere. And that with a 3k nearby cable, something like a discussion could be starting.

I was sitting in the armchair; I was crumbling that disgusting black plastic, it was like it was empty, I couldn't feel the usual-favourite-silk Litze-1mm in it.

Then I thought about the air-wire-system of Darvas, and the hysteria around insulation, and the worship of dielectric parameters. And when I handed the wire back, it somehow slipped out of my mouth, I don't know why, to make me a naked version.
Because all I knew was that the elementary fibres were enamelled, so, with due care, there would be no short circuit. He said at first that it couldn't be, because it 'wouldn't hold', it would come apart, it would be untransportable, and it would get tangled in a way that would be impossible to get out of.
Then he called me a few days later to say that he had solved the problem, albeit with great anguish, and that I could come and get it.

Then at home I found out what all the fuss was about.
Imagine a piece of cardboard about the size of A4, with notches on it, and the 4 wires wrapped around it, the banana ends taped down and marked where to start unwinding. Well, by the time I had the first one down, I was almost screwed... :)

Some f...thin wire, not much, about half a dozen with two strands of white sewing thread in the middle, around which the whole project was gently wrapped, this wire itself, one of the poles of one of the channels.

So much for loosely, that when I took it apart and put it into place, it was spaced from 2 mm to 2 cm. Lightly crumpled, but it was definitely coming apart. Because it did, 
I finally got the thread out. :)

An easy half an hour on all fours, plugging everything in and taking care, because it was like a living creature whose favourite form of appearance is the 'organic tangle'. And then I looked up Zsolt Huszti's phone number, [the owner of the Heed Audio] and I thought about how I was going to phrase it if the enamel didn't work, and I short-circuited it, and I said 'guess what, Zsolt, the Nexus went fine for about 6 and a half years, and then I'm sitting there, and whoops, all the end transistors are all fucked up at once, I just don't get it... "

So, I turned it on like I've never turned it on before: started the record, plugged in the two Nexus in a flash, heard the sound, okay, about 1 second, and stopped the music and let the amp warm up so at least the currents would set.
Those who know me will guess that it was only about 3 minutes...
And I spent 3 minutes thinking about that 1 second. What I heard.
Because it was an incredible sound.
And I finally started it.
And I couldn't believe my ears.
Some heavenly richness of tone. A translucence, an airiness. A chorus and a chord progression. Perfect mid-tone. And bass like never before.

 

 

Records were exchanged and I went from one amazement to another. I love the plucked instrumentsI like the harpsichord at the forefront. The harp, something that to say 'faithfulness to the instrument' doesn't quite cover the the essence of the story. Something extra was created, and not a little. And no some parallel sound quality, but a bewilderingly better one.
More, more beautiful, more real.

I'm an enthusiastic type, but this is not the first time I've stimulated large-scale change on my first try. However long we've been in the game, no one can escape the grip of preconceptions in the short term. Believe me, no one. So I cautiously waited for the days to pass, for the magic to fade. In the meantime, I went through the obligatory rounds required by an old Spendor: where there is 70 cm of internal continuation of the speaker wire, i.e., 2/3 super wire, 1/3 trash wire.
What would you have done? Well, with difficulty, but I also replaced that 30 year old 0.5mm twisted PVC insulated wire with this new system. Difficult because there was the connector, which was a horribly corroded, uncleanable thing, some kind of nickel-plated iron, simply offended, not only my hifier brain, but my engineering brain.
How do you clean off copper? Everyone knows that it will corrode in hours, and after a month it will look like this.

No problem. Let's have a good terminal. I'll order it, the postman will deliver it after 3 days.
Now, this is where the maze really came. I suggest you get online and start looking for the 'right' connector.
After 3 days I came to the conclusion that two things were clear: there is no really good one under 1k, or there is, but the shadow of the bigger, unbought brother would interfere with the music listening.

The other is that it will have an 'own-sound', which, given the characteristics of my wire system, will have a questionable chance of blending into the synergy of the system.
So what then? That old terminal, it looks terribly sh@t, I knew it wasn't going back. I just don't want it.

After a bit of thinking, I took a deep breath, thought of Alexander the Great and the Gordian knot, and skipped the whole thing. I had to order a longer wire from Rudolf, who laughed, because when I first asked him what he suggested, what kind of buckle, he immediately told me to try to skip it. But I still wound up with a week of WBT rainbows. Finally I put the 70 cm longer wire, straight into the crossover.

And from about that point on, everything really fell into place, and from that point on everybody liked the sound, not just me.
Obviously, I had to try to change the 30 cm between the connector and the crossover, because people are greedy and want homogeneous wiring out of the goodness of their hearts.

The Spendor is 3 way monitor, that's 2×6 wires. Finish, polish, solder, blah, blah, blah... It was completely unnecessary and useless: there, the 'trash' wire was simply designed into the sound. I put them back in, with the corroded hooks as they were.

And in a flash, all the magic came back.

After almost 3 months, the system has calmed down. And so have I. And it's gotten ready-resonant, all this complexity has crept in. I got used to it. It's all gathering dust, maybe that's what it takes??
So, now it's possible to write about it.
The sound?
That's fantastic. So much so that every record I haven't listened to with the new wire is a surprise. A pleasant surprise.
More sound. A broader spectrum. More structured everything. Sometimes I hardly recognize the record for how good it can sound.
More strings, more choir members, more air. Better lows, much better bass. The singers, what they've got is downright phenomenal. Far beyond anything I've ever heard in my career as a hifier.
I have two faint memories of this experience.

One was when I had a pair of single-way, yellow diaphragm, 16 cm funnel-less paper speakers in an OB wall many years ago, without any crossover. The harpsichord, it was simply fantastic. I couldn't believe it existed.

 

Now I hear that harpsichord again. There, then, the rest of it was weak, high swallowed, the top was never there, the low was nothing below about 100 Hz, but that strange 'stringiness', I remember it to this day. I never thought I'd ever hear that in a Xovered system, in a way that I liked the rest of the range.

The other was the moment when ML №512 first rang in the room.

When there are no questions, no comparisons, no analysis of where and what has improved. Just some strange feeling that something is weird, that it can't be that good...

I haven't dared to move since.

Rudolf mentioned two more things when I asked him why I like it so much now.
One is that the wire itself is from 1952. That is, it was produced with the technology that was used between the two Wars. He didn't know exactly how it was done, compared to, say, now, but he certainly didn't know that there was no copper recycling, no copper scrap buying/recovery.

The way it works today is that our discarded mobile phone chargers and E-stuffs are piled up in a rubbish yard somewhere in India or China, the plastics are burnt off with a brutal amount of black smoke emissions. And this 'copper' goes to the warehouses of the mafia, and from there it goes into the complex system of copper smelting, where yes, they clean it and do all sorts of things with it, but this sooty pile of plastic smoking in the dumps, I don't think you can get away with it.

The other, a bit metaphysical approach,

That these metals, such as copper wire, behave like living systems; during manufacture they develop 'not perfect' electron orbital positions, which very slowly settle back to stable equilibrium where. And if not disturbed again, they reward the 'rest' with a minimal amount of added, as yet unmeasured, disturbance signal components.

This speakercable will not be commercialised, that is obvious. Few would dare to do it, and you really need an undisturbed environment and a stable nervous system to connect it. How it would do in your set /  country, I have no way of knowing. A small number of trials have been done with some improved version with a completely new insulation, which also gave very good, but mostly shockingly very good results. I can no longer test these, and I'm not a test lab. It's just a great pleasure to have such a good sound.

For me, this wire is a reverse Naked King.

I've heard many expensive wires that are really good, but even more where the king is actually naked, only the price tag doesn't even allow you to assume that. Instead, it's all wording about synergy and component sensitivity and non-existent six-pound copper.
Here, the wire is physically naked, yet its sonic qualities are accentuated by sumptuous clothing. Clothing that gives much more than the austere physical parameters; it drives you into the music, into the love of music. And the realisation of what records we have carved out over the years...

Your systems are different from mine, the beloved music is different, the taste is different, practically everything. Actually, there is only one lesson for you from this report:
That you may have a situation where the 'system is wired properly', the sound, the wiring, is close to the maximum, there is not much of a reasonable step up, the music is going on, it's a quite relaxed situation, the sound is really good.

And maybe it's not. It's really not.

You might find that a simple wire change would give you a staggering musical extra experience. Plus, it might be a lot cheaper. Either with this one I have, or another one made by another guru or a big manufacturer. The point now is not the specific type, but that these two/four pieces of wire, this one already exists somewhere, and are resting nicely, waiting for you, for the intersection of coincidences, in a drawer, on a desk, or even in another system.

But maybe not.
And you really can't get a better sound out of it, even with Odin.

Odin Gold

Synergy is a strange thing. Habit, and individual taste, and inevitable snobbery, that's the main thing.





If I've disturbed you, I apologise.
Good listening, everyone,

Regards,
C.

P.S.

after a few months, the bare wire theory achieved such success in one area, which is rare in hi-fi: digital interconnects. Recipe: take an enameled thin copper wire, as thin as you can find, solder it as a signal line, the ground can be a little thicker, and that's it. XLR needs duplicated thin lines of course. Hardcore hifi fans can go up to 0.05mm, that's approx. the thickness of a medium hair. Not easy-cake to solder it.
And you can throw the old, expensive digital interconnect in the trash.

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Monteverdi: L'Orfeo - concert - L'Arpeggiata

Budapest.

King Spa. 

It is old, 500 years old, dilapidating, clean but a bit crumbling all over, water is leaking all around the place with taps and fittings from before the War for sure. 

However, an amazing beauty pervades. Incomparable colours and shades. Dim lights, semi-darkness, and a hasp of sunshine through the orifice of the dome like a light sword just much longer. 

We are sitting in the hot water and I am trying to find out why I am so much fond of L’Arpeggiata?

The name, maybe, for it reminds me of my favourite composer, Kapsberger who composed Toccata Arpeggiata which touched even Christina just as much as she chose the name for the ensemble.

They released loads of records you cannot even enlist. All started with early dances, Tarantella and Chaconne, on the sensitive borderline of Renaissance-Baroque, then, in the following years, the horizon widened genre-wise too; Monteverdi was followed by Purcell and Handel, jazz and even several sorts of folk music from all over Europe, the Mediterranean and the Orient.

What matters, however, is the All’Improvviso record. I do not mean the music which became a legend later but I mean an invisible look. It is in the case, under the CD; it is hardly noticeable, almost impossible to take a picture of but the main point does come through.

A young skinny girl with a fringe and an elderly musician with a grey beard are in the pic; Christina is explaining something away intensely, Gianluigi Trovesi, the jazz-clarinettist is watching, smiling softly, he will just not scratch his head thinking what this is all about, how he is getting amid Early Music again, what this woman wants him to do. Clarinets come in the scene only 100 years later, Christina is gleaming with sparks in her eyes albeit you cannot see it in the pic. What you can see is that she conceived everything and no need to fear, it will be all right. Remember what a success Tarantella was.

Then these records gently shook the entire playing of classical music in Europe and brought Early Music in fashion nobody could ever think of. Monteverdi, Cavalieri and Caccini became genuine stars, the audience was crazy about them, the youth listened to long forgotten composers almost never heard before. New generations started to imitate the ensemble the best singers in the world joined if for one recording.

What the secret was is hard to tell. 

Perhaps the unbelievable sensitivity with which Christina took care of the instrumentation or the hidden content which she seduced out of these early melodies or perhaps the reconsideration of the music improvisation or the upfront turning against the apathetic, lethargic and audience-slaying performance of classical music, the squared sonatas, nerve-killing fugues and horrendous symphonies we receive loads of.

Then years passed, the thin chick with a fringe became a serious woman; L’Arpeggiata derailed off this special rail, there is some topsy-turvies in the repertoire but she left the legendary records with us; I paid for a second-hand Tarantella SACD so much I do dare to tell, the first track of the Landi album makes my heart throb even today … I am so much fond of this ensemble that Handel goes wild is bullshit, I do not recommend it to anyone, yet, I do not mind and do not offend them, let them go wherever they wish to, no one should interfere; as for me, they might as well play electric rock or Stockhausen, it will not alter my love of them.

Today, however, there is something grave going on.

Monteverdi and Orfeo - the very first milestone in Baroque music and the world of opera -the origin, the singularity.

The Palace of Arts, [Budapest], the building itself, the inner space give me mixed emotions. Outside the colour illumination is extremely crappy, the auditorium is far too big, albeit it is alright inside and we are sitting in a very good seat at the stalls, in the middle of the first quarter.

Start.

Well-known and familiar melodies which provide the frame of one of the most famous love stories of mankind. Some weirdly special feeling right from the first seconds. The instrumentation and expression make me feel that the upholstery has got ripped on the horizon and we can look out at some distant lands.

How Christina lured these wind instrument players to herself I know not but I have never heard the first fanfare part like this; I was shivering. 

Then Emőke Baráth walked in nicely, yes, our Emőke [she is Hungarian] in a fretted outfit as Musica and sang the introduction to what we are going to hear in an angel’s voice.

Then the story got started. Also, a series of amazement. The two violinists, they are playing so much differently from the other violinists of the rest of the orchestras that here comes the part of the secret. Fine, punctual, nicely elaborated, dot dot dot, however, somewhere deep inside there is some ebullience, something disquietingly beautiful. It is striking in the record as well. The continuo line is very intense; two keyboard instruments, violas da gamba, a harp, a theorba, a guitar, all subordinated under the lyrics, bear in mind that it is the famous Nuove Musica where the lyrics is not pinned onto the notes like one part of the many but it is the Prima, and, indeed, it will turn out that it is extremely relevant.

The back row, Nymphs, Shepherds and others; unexpectedly brilliant solos were heard from here, of course, it is easy this way that singers as good as Vincenzo Capezzuto are standing waiting for their short part.

Orpheo, a Mexican-French tenor, Rolando Villazón was not to my liking at first for he pushed it very Italian, big opera-like, intensely, high-spiritedly; it is too early at this point, it should be this way 150 years later, I thought, he should be singing a bit more gently.

But then came the messenger telling us what had happened to de Euridice, and Orpheo set off to the Underworld; I made a full slew-round, albeit the voice remained nearly the same. 

Why? 

Because as he is standing in front of Charon doing his best to be let in, he is playing nicely, then whining and sawing the air and shouting that he does want to follow his beautiful Euridice and why he is not allowed to for he loves her so much and he will take her out for sure and it did not change even when Hope dropped his hand and waved good-bye, understand? To set off somewhere with no hope - who could do it today? It moved me so deeply.

The story that a man loves a woman so much that he follows her to the Underworld has amazed people for 2000 years and has made them shiver; yes, it amazes these 1700 spectators in the Palace of Art even today.

Then the begging gets a response. Metaphysical infiltration is gradually becoming more and more concentrated. Orpheo wants the Gods to feel sorry for him. If you pursue something very hard it has clear cross-modulations in invisible Higher Worlds. And yes, Pluto’s wife says: this Thracian man in love wants the woman so much that we should find out how he can get her back …

The music follows the more and more complex lyrics, the spirituality in full fidelity just like Camerata Bardi imagined the comeback to Antique traditions in Firenze.

Orpheo, the tenor Villazón is simply excellent. There are fine whiffles and nice melody arches in the music, and again, the tooters, I have never heard something like this. Charon, a weakling thin man, John Taylor Ward, he has such powerful voice that the audience is rumbling with appreciation. The soloists are coruscating, all of them are singing by heart, they are actually playing.

The continuo is so perfect that I am getting the hang of why this monody was such a big success in the old Venice and why a complete novelty was borne for which no name was conceived out of the blue and thus it remained to be called the opera. 

The Opera.

Then comes the climax, the well-known paradox of turning back or not, which has long shown the bitter example of how hard it is to go forward, not to look back trembling whether it is going to be fine this way, what people say about us, rather, do it, proceed straight ahead.

Thousands of books have been written about the unavoidable failure. It is far too serious. It is a bitter pill for us, men. That we will lose any way or another; that Amor’s command is stronger than Pluto’s prohibition and that Emőke, that is, Euridice, before she falls back to the darkness whispers beautifully: “You lost me with your excessive love”.

Then, in the end, after great sorrow, Apollo, Benoit Arnoult, whose voice took me aback, lifts Orpheo beside himself. 

Here Monteverdi attenuated the story as we know that Orpheo, wishing to forget about his sorrow, made love with all sorts of women - Nymphs, Maenads who, feeling that their glorious cavalier is still in love with that bi..h Eurydice even while making love with them, they hate her a lot, and ripped him apart and threw him into a deep crevasse. Then they cleared  their hands by the water of Helicon river, and legend says, Helicon was so ashamed of it that its water disappeared from the course…

But now he is sitting next to Apollo and drums and rattles are playing with the hailing choir and the ladies start dancing gently on the stage, the violins are crying and laughing at the same time, the orchestra is playing so nicely that the women in the audience are swallowing their tears, the men are heavily embarrassed and a few people almost jump onto the stage from the first rows at the very end of the performance.

Standing ovation, the Palace of Art is close to collapsing, and, Christina finally turns back as she was directing back to us, she is glowing, I could see the same look in her eyes as in the inside of the record; 15 years have passed and nothing has changed and I think it is going to stay like this forever and ever.

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Translated by Kenesei Andrea

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Characters:
Orpheus
Rolando Villazón
Eurydice, Musica, muse of music
Emőke Baráth
Messenger of nymphs
Giuseppina Bridelli
Proserpina
Céline Scheen
Nymph, Hope
Benedetta Mazzucato
Shepherd
Vincenzo Capezzuto
Shepherd, Echo, Soul from the underworld
Aidan Coburn
Shepherd, Soul from the underworld
Jeffrey Thompson
Apollo, Soul from the underworld
Benoît Arnoult
Charon, Shepherd, Soul from the underworld
John Taylor Ward
Pluto, Soul from the underworld
Dingle Yandell
Participating:
Ensemble L'Arpeggiata (diir.: Christina Pluhar)

Budapest, Palace of Arts, 10 March, 2018

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Barbara Strozzi - The Virtuosissima Cantatrice

Barbara Strozzi

She was a woman to start with. 

A woman composer. 

It was the same rarity as today. Looking at the year, 1635, this scarcity becomes near impossibility as we should not pretend, the man-woman issue was kind of feudal in Europe as few as 50, let alone 400 years ago.

Or was it not? The answer is “it was” unfortunately… However, there were island-like places with things going on differently. More exactly, there was one place like this for sure, a near island, the keyword is rather a lagoon.

Yes, again, umpteenth time, Venice.

It is the odd city where the streets are made of water and the inhabitants go after their business in boats. We are in the age of the opening of the first opera houses; the incomprehensibly steep rise of theatre and music life.

The first expansion of Baroque.

Barbara Strozzi was born in 1619; figliuola elettiva, the expression survived which suggests that she was adopted. She received the best education, Cavalli himself was among her teachers. Giulio Strozzi adopted her - we speak of father-daughter project because Strozzi's music pieces were made to Strozzi's verses - as he, besides being the head of an influential family in Firenze was an outstanding poet writing plenty of poems and librettos for the novel emerging genre called simply the Opus, i.e., the Opera.

Strozzi established Accademia degli Unisoni which was a branch of Accademia degli Incogniti circle, the nearly mystical sect where the members wrapped in anonymity or pseudonyms were present in all arts, sciences and politics, the doge himself cannot habeen an exception.

When Barbara joined the organising of Unisoni at the age of 17 she had such a voice that some poets dedicated their poems and composers the soprano arias to her. The Virtuosissima Cantatrice had turned 25 when something extraordinary happened in Monteverdi’s free Venice: a lady released her own 25 madrigals on her father’s verses with the permit and even recommendation of the influential Incogniti.

It was very fair indeed…

Success was huge; there were consecutive performances, the audience threw loads of flowers at the author-diva with a marvellous voice. She got into the high society, her beauty expanded as much as her madrigals took Monteverdi’s and D’India’s beloved genre to summit.
Her name was added to theirs in the later collections.

She was so beautiful that intriguing, tabloid-level rumours circulated: she was said to be a courtesan and even the aging Monteverdi’s lover (!!!), mind you, rumours were customary in a lively city where people listened to the lies of globetrotters and believed, e.g., that cephalopods mine diamonds in flower bulbs on remote islands…

Her music is in the pink even today. The record is in our hands; its quality demanded a detailed introduction.

Capella Mediterranea, the conductor is Leonardó Garcia Alarcón born in Argentina; mention was made of them at Falvetti CD. Mind you, La Paz and Venice are over 11 thousand kms from each other; it is such a big distance that a standard magnetic compass would direct us to the Antarctic or the middle of the Ocean instead of South-America with a declination error… she spanned the distance with a single CD without error of a degree per second.

The record includes two Monteverdi and one D’India pieces as a frame; as a compass they show what music was heard the time, this ambiance accommodation is really useful 400 years later. As we will make comparisons, no escape, we need something to relate to.

Let us go off the beaten track of “insert the disc, listen” and have a closer look at the track list. The last number is not the framing Monteverdi madrigal but Strozzi’s L’amante modesto. Some faint assumption passes over that something has stepped out of the frame; is this what Alarcón sends to us? This is exactly what is going on, let us start it and proceed from back, track No.10.

Phenomenal.

We expected it to be fine but it is much more than that. Buoyant élan, the parts soar to the skies. Celebration, then pain, then delicate explaining away, out-slid, despair, resolution, but something is wrong again…yes, we do recognise it, the theme is love with all its controversies. Like a good theatre. The orchestra is in unity, the soloists will dream of this mood conjured by L’amante modesto for weeks.

The rest of the tracks is more contained in the imaginary field we have in mind of the era; with some similarity to Monteverdi’s works; anyway, all of them are masterpieces but perhaps this Che si puó fare is one that gets stuck in a sensitive filter.

A lament with the descending ostinato famous since Monteverdi which is anchored in our musical subconscious. An interesting surplus can be felt here, it is the female viewpoint, the way women can see the total of it; they weave the fine net in another way than men, and it is exactly what makes it especially authentic.

Once more, the entry of the wind instruments. It is heart-beating on a louder volume.

Alarcón said that this record is actually an experiment of restoration: such could have been an evening performance of Accademia degli Unisoni around 1650, in a relatively small circle in Venice or the salon of Strozzi palace in Firenze.

Did it succeed?

My answer is that

the ladies’ perfume can be smelt; it was paid with heavy gold to the captain of the ship from Moluccas; the harmony of the clothes and jewels can be felt; the odour of the inlaid floor mingles with the remote shreds of singing of the gondoliers infiltrating through the closed windows.

Highly recommended.

Translated by Kenesei Andrea

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Thank you for the images. 

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