Janine Elliot has a listen to the Scheherazade Suite by Chasing the Dragon on reel-to-reel tape.

I always get excited when I hear that Mike Valentine is about to create a new album. I know that both the performance and the production will be stellar. Unfortunately, train drivers were on strike the day I was due to visit the Henry Wood Hall in Southwark, London, to witness the recording itself, but luckily for me, Mike sent me the reel-to-reel version of the recording to listen to.

Henry Wood Hall has been used a lot for rehearsing and recording since 1971, the capital’s first purpose-built rehearsal hall named after the famous conductor. This hall has excellent acoustics, so I knew this would be a brilliant recording. Mike has been playing with tapes and microphones since his days at the BBC many years ago just as I did, and then setting up his own recording company “Chasing the Dragon”. Each production is carefully thought out and I have always been in awe of the work he and his wife Francoise do. Like his taste in shirts, he loves bright flamboyant music, and Rimsky Korsakov’s ‘Scheherazade’ is no exception.

This Symphonic Suite, op35 of 1888 is based on the Middle Eastern folk tale ‘One Thousand and One Nights’, and is often known as ‘The Arabian Nights’. Common to all the stories in the book is the character Shahryar and his wife Scheherazade. The story goes that Sultan Shahryar was betrayed by his first wife and as a result didn’t trust females, so each time he married a new virgin he had them beheaded the next day. This continued for three years until he married Scheherazade. For 1001 nights she told him a different story, carefully timing it so that she never finished the ending before dawn broke. This meant he had to keep her alive for a further day to complete the little story the next evening. By the time 1001 nights and an equal number of stories had passed Shahryar had begun to trust women again! The orchestral work ‘Scheherazade’ has four related movements with the musical theme of both the characters Shahryar and Scheherazade appearing in all movements in different ways, a truly programmatic work. I have always loved this work; one that you can easily get lost in the music and whisked away into fantasy, to the extent of feeling for Scheherazade by the end of the fourth movement. The composer, Nikolai Rimsky Korsakov was Russian and born in 1844. As well as a composer and teacher he also had a career in the Russian naval military, a factor that may have influenced him to write Scheherazade.

The main mixing desk used for the recording was a familiar 25-year-old analogue Neve model with new transformers and having been recapped (capacitors break down with age so need replacing). Splitters were used at the output to send the signals to the various machines as described below. In this recording Mike used his favourite microphones; the brilliant valve and variable polar Flea 12 (their version of the AKG C12) as the two outriggers (positioned fully left and right), for first violin, percussion, and woodwind; a transistor Neumann U47fet on the harp; a U89 on the horns and brass; Neumann KM84 on Tuba and as woodwind spot mic; Neumann TLM67 (a transistor version the valve U67) on cello and timps; and finally the main spaced stereo pair being ELAM 251 (Telefunken asked AKG in 1960 to design a valve based variable polar microphone for them) with a Jecklin disc placed between them. A Neumann KU100 binaural head was also used for recording for downloadable headphone wav/DSD files. The ELAMs and C12’s used Telefunken 6072A valves. For the recording several machines were used. For vinyl the different microphone channels were fed onto two Zoom F8N multitrack machines at 32bit/192kHz for later mixing at Air Studios with ace engineer Jake Jackson and mastered at half speed (16 2/3 rpm) onto the master vinyl disc (Air Studios have specially adapted one of their 4 Neumann VMS80 disc cutting lathes to record at half speed if it is fed a digital source at half speed/pitch). As each Zoom F8N only has 8 channels, two machines were synched using timecode to create more channels for the recording. For reel-to-reel lovers, the analogue recording was done on a ½ inch Studer A820 at 30ips and using Recording the Masters SM900 ½” wide 12” spools, operated by Petronel Butuc from The Audiophile Clinic. All copies were produced on LPR90 tapes using Mike’s own special golden empty spools. These spools are very thick aluminium, making it sturdy unlike the very bendable EMI metal spools we used at the BBC, whose best use was as portable coffee/tea cup holders! The spools also have 5 fixing screws making them even more rigid than the usual 4-screw spools. A Nagra VI was used for monitoring the recording so that the conductor could hear a stereo mix and two Tascam DA-3000 digital recorders recorded the binaural head at 24/192 and DSD128. Of course, the cabling is as important as the technology used, and around £10,000 worth of wiring was deployed in the hall, namely Nordost Odin 2 and Zensati Zorro XLRs.

For the end result, 1 day of rehearsing and 1 day of recording was needed, and the whole production cost just over £100,000 to put together. Making music isn’t cheap. At the helm of the National Symphony Orchestra was the conductor Antony Inglis, with leader Katerina Nazarova. This orchestra was founded in the 1940s. Antony has recorded more concerts at the Royal Albert Hall than anyone else and has appeared in concert halls around the world from Sydney to Tokyo, and similarly recorded in studios around the world.  Violinist Katerina was born in Tasmania and achieved B. Mus degree in 2007 and Master of Music in Advanced Performance at the Royal College of Music in 2009. She plays a 1739 Del Gesu violin in this recording, valued at around £7M! Her violin solos sounded exquisite.

For this review I listened to the 15ips CCIR 10½” reel-to-reel tape version, though as always there will be versions on ½ speed-mastered vinyl and downloadable wav and DSD files. When recording this album Mike wanted to see if the ½ speed mastered vinyl matched the reel-to-reel in terms of musicality and reality, coming to the conclusion that the tape was still slightly better, and as I would expect. Indeed, this is one of the best reel-to-reel tapes I have ever heard, not only for sound quality – and that included wide dynamic range – but in terms of musicality and the authenticity of a massive orchestra in my living room. Everything was in the right place, with an excellent bass end and pin-sharp detail from triangles at the top. Playing mostly on my rebuilt Ferrograph Logic 7 the instruments were positioned superbly in my living room with exquisite detail from percussion, horns, woodwind, and violins. I have listened to many versions of this work, mostly on vinyl, but have never been so captivated by the music as I was with this Chasing the Dragon reel-to-reel. The tape itself is excellent quality with no noticeable hiss, and soundstage is so believable.

The first movement “The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship” has a powerful start on trombone, tuba and strings, and woodwind, representing the Sultan, and then followed by peace and tranquility from the famous violin solo representing Scheherazade with tranquil chords on harp. Everything builds up again, representing the sea (and possibly Rimsky-Korsakov’s naval influence here). There is plenty of reserve left for the sudden peaks and when they happened they were loud! Despite this there were no signs of distortion though at times I wondered if my VU needles might weld themselves to the ends of the meters! There was excellent sound-staging and depth to the sound, with all microphones working well together. This is brilliantly engineered with nothing sounding out of place. Imagine you are sitting a few rows back in the audience. The tempo of this movement was also perfectly judged. The second movement “The Story of Kalandar Prince” begins with a repeat of the violin solo theme of Scheherazade and then straight into a new section with woodwind. Finally, brass fanfares colour the music into a new theme. There was plenty of space and empathy with the composer’s wishes in the performance here. The orchestra was faultless. The third movement “The Young Prince and the Young Princess” is my favourite movement, a romantic idyll. Interestingly the Scheherazade theme is now performed on the clarinet, with percussion added later; the triangle was so tight and clear and totally at the right level with respect to the other musicians. I hate recordings where a harp, harpsichord or percussion are suddenly appearing out of place a few inches in front of your nose! The fourth movement is a very exciting work – “Festival – The Sea – The Ship Breaks Against a Cliff”. As its title implies this is lots of ideas and consequently lots of dynamic range. This movement joins all ideas of the previous movements together, even including the very beginning heard again. As the movement climaxes with a big storm and ending with a shipwreck to be followed by Scheherazade’s theme closing the whole work down to a peaceful ending. Despite so many ideas here, nothing was performed out of place, nor was the recording; again, this was faultless and highly engrossing. I listened throughout the work for bum notes, and if they did exist, I couldn’t hear them. In the recording session there were only a few retakes, for example the Scheherazade solos, and at Air Studios all was put together for the vinyl, ensuring at timings of retakes fitted perfectly. For this reel-to-reel recording everything gelled so well; the brass instruments were razor sharp, particularly the trombones in the last movement and strings were precise. This is the best recording I have heard of this work. As the Suite faded away toward the final Scheherazade theme I was left feeling as I do after a long holiday away; depressed that it was all over and wanting to start it all over again.

I don’t often get excited about classical recordings, despite being a classically trained musician. I tend to prefer jazz these days, but boy did I enjoy this classical production. Not only was the performance ace but this has been expertly produced at all stages. Recorded on RTM tape for a change, this was so well copied and sounded great on any of the tape machines I played it on. If you want to be cast away into the world of fantasy this recording will whisk you there. Just tell your neighbours to go out for the evening so you can play it loud! £400 is the going price for master copies and this one is worth every penny and the best I have heard yet from Chasing the Dragon.

Janine Elliot