Britten: The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra; Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge.

Britten: The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra; Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge. Benjamin Britten; London Symphony Orchestra, English Chamber Orchestra. JVC XRCD 0226-2.

While upgrading to new and better hardware is always fun and most often rewarding, if one can afford it, the struggle to find suitable software--LPs, tapes, CDs, or DVDs--to do the new equipment justice has long haunted the audiophile. Open-reel master tapes would seem to be the ideal answer but obviously impractical. Direct-to-disc and half-speed remastered recordings took up some of the slack in the vinyl days, with gold discs taking their place early on in the compact-disc era. But now that the gold disc has gone the way of the dodo, one has fewer choices.

Understand, during all the time I reviewed gold discs from Mobile Fidelity, DCC, Compact Classics, and the like, I often found improvements in the sound of the gold over their silver counterparts; but as I said time and again, I was never convinced it was actually the gold-foil that contributed to the sound's betterment so much as it was their superior transfer engineering. The gold, I always figured, might have just added to the discs' allure and justified their high price. Careful, expert, and time-consuming engineering of the tape to disc is where I considered the improvements to have come. Which is where JVC, the Japanese Victor Corporation, entered the scene several years ago. They have eschewed the gold plating and gone with the best possible transference to silver disc, first remastering some of RCA's best old "Living Stereo" recordings and now starting in on some of Decca's older product.

Most of JVC's choices have been consensus classics, and the comparisons I've made with over a dozen discs have found improvements--some slight, to be sure--in JVC's product over the conventional equivalent. They have also packaged the product handsomely in old-fashioned 78-type foldout albums. Unfortunately, JVC have not eschewed the gold-disc price. They are issuing exactly what appeared on the original LPs, no more, no less, and at a price almost double the cost of a conventional disc. Worth it? Not to most people, and, indeed, not to me if I didn't already own the dozen or so things I've bought so far and didn't already love each and every one of them. Nor have I been disappointed. The sonic improvements have ranged from barely audible, maybe not audible at all and only imagined, to clearly audible and extremely worthwhile. In most cases, the improvements have been in overall smoothness, sometimes in definition, sometimes in bass extension or bass solidity.

Yet it's here that we run into the old audiophile vs. skeptic argument: The audiophile will argue that if you can't hear the differences, it's because your equipment is not good enough to reveal them. Conversely, the skeptic will argue that if you hear a difference it's because you're predisposed to hear a difference, especially if you've just laid out a chunk of cash for the new product.

My advice: Trust no one in these controversies. Try one of these JVC discs for yourself. Compare it to your old disc. If you hear no difference, take it back and never buy another one. It's that simple. Here are a few JVC remasterings that I personally found were sonically improved: the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto with Van Cliburn (JMXR24004); Stravinsky's Rite of Spring with Georg Solti and the Chicago Symphony (JVCXR-0225-2); Offenbach's Gaite Parisienne with Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops (JVCXR-0224-2); and Rimsky-Korsakoff's Scheherazade (JMCXR-0015), Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony (JMCXR-0020), Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra (JMCXR-0007), Respighi's Pines of Rome (JMCXR-0008), and Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition (JMCXR-0016), all with Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony. Now to the subject at hand, Britten's Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra.

Benjamin Britten wrote what he initially called "The Instruments of the Orchestra" for a school children's film in 1946, basing his music on a hornpipe theme by Henry Purcell. The idea was to highlight and showcase each family of instruments in the symphony orchestra. It may seem overly simple to some listeners and perhaps even clumsily constructed, but it hit a chord with the public and continues to make for delightful listening, especially when presented so felicitously by the composer himself and the LSO in this 1964 recording. Britten conducts the piece at a rather quick but enlivening pace, and it's done without narration so the music can better be enjoyed. Also on the disc is Britten's Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, Bridge being his mentor, played by the English Chamber Orchestra and recorded in 1968. The Decca/London disc's inclusion of the Simple Symphony was not a part of the Decca original and is, therefore, absent on this JVC edition.

So how is JVC's remastering of these Britten chestnuts? Pretty good, actually, although I had never thought of the Decca/London disc that I've had for so long as an audiophile favorite. Maybe I just hadn't visited it for quite a while. Anyway, the most noticeable differences show up in the Young Person's Guide in terms of the JVC's overall greater smoothness. Whereas the Decca/London original is a bit glassy, steely, and hard, the JVC remastering is much more natural, the edges very delicately softened to appear more realistic. Other differences are more subtle, with a good bite to the new rendering and a touch more firmness to the bass and dynamics. The Frank Bridge Variations, however, reveal much less of a difference, and I daresay in a blind test I would be hard pressed to tell the JVC remaster from the Decca/London original. I suspect it's because the Variations were recorded a touch soft to begin with, so any differences in smoothness between the two were difficult for me to determine.

Let's just say I enjoyed the new JVC sonics, but I missed the Simple Symphony that accompanied the older disc. Ah, well, you can't have everything. Would I recommend the JVC disc to anyone but audiophiles? Not really. It's costly, it excludes the Simple Symphony, and the only serious sonic differences show up in the Young Person's Guide. Nevertheless, for listeners interested in the best possible sound in Britten's own recording of the Young Person's Guide, regardless of price, this new JVC remastering is the disc to own.