Tír Na HiFi

It was the type of phone call that you hope for but so seldom receive – Lyric FM rang my wife to inform her that she had won a prize of a weekend for two in the Park House Hotel in Galway and a pair of season tickets for the Music for Galway Midwinter Festival. That explains why we travelled West by train last Friday.

Full details of the music we enjoyed are on http://www.musicforgalway.ie. The Music for Galway Board of Directors seem determined to push the boundaries of music as much as possible: take Barber’s Adagio on Saxophones for example. And Erkki-Sven Tüür Lamentatio complete with visuals by Mihai Cucu. I was especially taken with the presentation of Leoš Janāček’s Intimate Letters. But in truth I could list out every piece as they were all so good. The energy and vitality that the ConTempo Quartet put into their performances was remarkable.

The Park House Hotel was wonderful as always. Galway was its usual self, buzzing on the Friday as Harlequins were in town for the Heineken Cup match with Connacht. On the Saturday night after the concert, we enjoyed listening to buskers on the streets – two guitarists positioned at the ‘Wilde’ seat were particularly noteworthy. A nice find at the end of Quay Street is the Cupān Tae teashop. The Corrib itself was in magnificent voice as it cascaded down the rapids, it makes rivers like the Liffey, Boyne and Shannon seem quite lifeless and dour. I got a few Rory Gallagher cds that were missing from my collection, good value in HMV as a few of them were on offer at ‘2 for €14.00’.

We had an amazing and very full weekend, so much so that we had to come home for a rest!

As I said at the start, it was the type of phone call that you hope for but so seldom receive...........

Fantastic news that, and well deserved to the two of you. It sounds like a fantastic weekend.

Your comment about the Corrib "The Corrib itself was in magnificent voice as it cascaded down the rapids, it makes rivers like the Liffey, Boyne and Shannon seem quite lifeless and dour" reminded of a childhood day spent in Galway city with my mother and aunt. (My late mother was originally from between Craughwell and Kilcolgan) Being trifty Galway women they had a picnic packed and we found a spot on the banks of the Corrib to struggle with damp salad sandwiches and strong flask tea. The Corrib was in full flight and the contrast of the calm of a packed lunch with these two women a few feet from "rapids" of the weir wasn't lost on a 10 year old.

I'm delighted you both enjoyed the weekend and enjoyed Galway, and huge thanks for reminding me of that snapshop that had fallen down the back of my memory.

Listening to the string quartet forced me to think about how I listen to music on my hi-fi system. Or more correctly how the music is presented by my system.

The quartet members were arranged in a semi-circle, on the left two violins, then the viola and the cello on the right. The amazing thing was that the sound 'appeared' to come from the centre of the quartet - almost mono like in character. Even deliberately listening to the cello on the right made no real difference. The cello sound still apparently came from the quarted as a whole, not from the individual instrument!! Yet listening to the same or similar music on my hi-fi system shows a cello on one side and the instruments ranged in an arc between the speakers. The illusion of depth is presented by the hi-fi system, in the theatre in Galway there was absolutely no awareness of stage 'depth' or layering of instruments.

Reality is a lot 'flatter' than my hi-fi system suggests. Have I been listening for the wrong qualities all these years? Perhaps years of playing guitar beside a loud drummer has caught up with me and my hearing is totally shot.

What do you guys think?

Rocker wrote:What do you guys think?

I think very few venues have good acoustics and a live performance, particularly un-amplified, won't have the imagery and soundstage we hifi buffs are used to. A recording of a live performance will (hopefully) be engineered by professionals who will take the time to place microphones and set up the recording so as to capture that sense of space and imagery.

What was it George Martin said, paraphrasing, he wanted to recording a painting and not a photograph.

I love when Brian Downey's drum sound starts at on the left and moves to the right, when his bass drum is in one speaker and all the cymbals crash in the other, but they never sounded like that live.

I like the recorded painting.

I have a few jazz albums recorded in "true stereo" with one stereo mic in front of the group, uniformly I'm unimpressed with them as a painting while undoubtedly they are probably a perfect photograph.

SJB