Tube Sacd

The lengths to which TACET have gone to secure an all-valve (tube) recording chain for this disc might seem perverse to some, but I think that the sound quality that they have achieved is a complete vindication of their unusual approach. The Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, under their founder Karl Munchinger, were of course one of the stars of the Decca repertoire during the "Golden Age" of valve mastered recordings in the late Fifties and early Sixties, and this disc has the wonderfully warm string tone of the renowned SXL series LPs from that era.

Get yourself vaccinated in time! The rococo red Mozart flood is looming on the horizon. In jubilee year it will bring us a plague of catchy tunes, also known as earworms, which you are advised to immunise yourself against to save your ear passages from clogging up. Particular risk of infection is expected from Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik K 525. It is as if the veins of a well-preserved mummy long frozen in glacier ice were to be refilled with living blood and spirits and return to life from eternal cryofication. At one point Mozart jumps so cheekily from G major to E flat major that one cannot help laughing.