The audio anoraks bringing the great vintage recordings back to life

If there’s one thing people find annoying about classical music anoraks, it’s our passion for vintage recordings. ‘Listen to that ravishing rubato,’ we gush, as an elderly soprano swoops and scoops to the accompaniment of what sounds like a giant egg-and-bacon fry-up. And if non-anorak listeners do manage to ignore the pops, scratches and static, what do they hear? Wrong notes. Plenty of them. Is that really Artur Schnabel murdering the mighty fugue of Beethoven’s ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata or is it Les Dawson?

There are actually two problems here — a disconcerting style of performance and crappy recorded sound. It’s important to distinguish between them. Those 78rpm records and the first LPs captured musical techniques that have died out across the board — in the opera house, concert halls and recital rooms. No one today can match the jubilant yet tortured cry of the Danish Wagnerian Heldentenor Lauritz Melchior, caught in his prime by HMV in the 1930s — and also hired to belt out ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at Dodgers baseball games in the 1960s after he became a US citizen.