DG Recordings

The CDs aren't crap, and you don't have a hearing problem. Many DGs can sound fine, many can sound awful. My complaint about DG has always been their multi-miking and (with their output from the early digital days particularly) an overall bright sound and lack of deepest bass (after hearing the Copland 3rd Symphony with Bernstein on DG, you wouldn't believe there was a bass drum in the score), and the fact that they rely entirely on their "tonmeister" to recreate a musical event instead of letting the event speak for itself. I prefer to hear what the orchestra says more than the recording engineer. If you read an article from TAS a few years back about a DG Met Opera orchestra recording attended by one of the writers, their were a whole slew of mikes, everything was run through a mixing board where it was processed and manipulated and adjusted by the tonmeister, and the orchestra only played short passages of the piece at a time. However, despite all that, the writer gave the finished recording a "Golden Ear" award, because the end result worked!! I find that there are a number of DG recordings, particularly the live ones and smaller ensembles, which can sound quite good and I listen to a lot, but there are some where the end result with an orchestra is bright, thin and almost unlistenable, or where instruments are spotlighted unrealistically. In the last case mentioned, that sometimes can work well with the music; then I try to pretend I'm in the orchestra listening instead of the audience. On the whole, their recent recordings seem to have have solved the bass and shrillness problems to a large extent; it's their recording philosophy that bothers me more than anything else, I guess. I can't help but think that the artists making the recording can't give their best, most spontaneous performance, particularly if performing small parts of a piece at a time.