Unpopular Opinions

[amw]

Unpopular opinion: I really appreciate it when the Diabelli and Goldberg Variations are all put on one track instead of being split up into 34 and 32 of them respectively. (Maybe with the liner notes indicating index points I can skip to if I particularly want to hear one specific variation.) Even more so for Brahms's Paganini Variations and Rachmaninov's Rhapsody.

(This opinion at least seems to be pretty unpopular among record companies. >_>)

[Florestan]

Unpopular opinion: I really appreciate it when the Diabelli and Goldberg Variations are all put on one track instead of being split up into 34 and 32 of them respectively. (Maybe with the liner notes indicating index points I can skip to if I particularly want to hear one specific variation.) Even more so for Brahms's Paganini Variations and Rachmaninov's Rhapsody.

(This opinion at least seems to be pretty unpopular among record companies. >_>)

A big plus one on this.

[Karl Henning]

Unpopular opinion: I really appreciate it when the Diabelli and Goldberg Variations are all put on one track instead of being split up into 34 and 32 of them respectively. (Maybe with the liner notes indicating index points I can skip to if I particularly want to hear one specific variation.) Even more so for Brahms's Paganini Variations and Rachmaninov's Rhapsody.

(This opinion at least seems to be pretty unpopular among record companies. >_>)

The Wergo recording (is there another? ) of Hindemith's one-act marionette opera, Das Nusch-Nuschi, is a single 60-minute track.  I have not yet formed an opinion, myself, but I did read at least one comment by a listener who disapproved in harsh terms  0:)

[Jo498]

It is frequent and tolerable with shorter sets of variations but I really dislike it with longer ones. Although the only one I recall was the first CD version of Gould's 1981 reording of the GBV. It probably had index points but not many players could access them in the late 1980s/early 1990s. I realize that it is sometimes a problem with playing files/discs on a computer because they insert little breaks between tracks but with a normal CD player it has only advantages to have one track for each variation.

But I am not fond of similarly breaking up longer movements that are not variations into tracks. I have seen this done for some longer Mahler movements (e.g. on the "Royal edition" Bernstein Mahler 3).

[Karl Henning]

It is frequent and tolerable with shorter sets of variations but I really dislike it with longer ones. Although the only one I recall was the first CD version of Gould's 1981 reording of the GBV. It probably had index points but not many players could access them in the late 1980s/early 1990s. I realize that it is sometimes a problem with playing files/discs on a computer because they insert little breaks between tracks but with a normal CD player it has only advantages to have one track for each variation.

But I am not fond of similarly breaking up longer movements that are not variations into tracks. I have seen this done for some longer Mahler movements (e.g. on the "Royal edition" Bernstein Mahler 3).

The worst (in my admittedly limited experience) is the finale of the LvB Op.125 divided into 10 tracks . . . .

[mc ukrneal]

Unpopular opinion: I really appreciate it when the Diabelli and Goldberg Variations are all put on one track instead of being split up into 34 and 32 of them respectively. (Maybe with the liner notes indicating index points I can skip to if I particularly want to hear one specific variation.) Even more so for Brahms's Paganini Variations and Rachmaninov's Rhapsody.

(This opinion at least seems to be pretty unpopular among record companies. >_>)

You can always rip the disc as one track if you want to. There is at least some recourse on this one...

[amw]

True, but not if I'm listening on Spotify or Qobuz or Naxos (where there's usually an audible break between tracks too).

Oh also forgot to mention this one Chandos disc where Britten's Young Persons Guide is like 34 tracks, most of them about 20 seconds long. Bleh. (edit: ok 20 tracks. still 19 too many.) Can't rip that to a single disc image either because there's other music on the cd.

Worst of all with non variation works is the Stockhausen-Verlag which divides everything into dozens of tiny tracks, although also shoutout to Hyperion for the Simpson 9 disc, a piece in one continuous movement that gets like 17 tracks (one of them is like 12 seconds long).

[Jo498]

The worst (in my admittedly limited experience) is the finale of the LvB Op.125 divided into 10 tracks . . . .

It seems by now almost standard to split it into two, with the 2nd tracking starting at "O Freunde", or a few bars earlier. Which I find very strange. Either give some preliminary formal analysis and do 10 tracks/indices or one. But one for the purely instrumental part and one for the rest?

I am not completely consistent myself here. I guess I prefer separate tracks for pieces that are only variations (or otherwise clearly in brief segments). But I find it confusing if there are e.g. 3 movements of a sonata and because one movement has variations they divide this one into separate tracks, e.g. LvB's op.131 should have 7 tracks, not one for each movement and another 7 or so for the variation movement in the middle.

[Madiel]

It seems by now almost standard to split it into two, with the 2nd tracking starting at "O Freunde", or a few bars earlier. Which I find very strange. Either give some preliminary formal analysis and do 10 tracks/indices or one. But one for the purely instrumental part and one for the rest?

It seems pretty obvious to me that they're doing this for listeners who want to jump straight to the vocal part. It's not a musicological exercise!

[Madiel]

And the rest of this discussion seems turned on its head: if you're dealing with a player or service that inserts audible gaps into a recording that was created without audible gaps, don't blame the people who created the recording. Blame the people who created inferior technology incapable of gapless play.

[Brian]

True, but not if I'm listening on Spotify or Qobuz or Naxos (where there's usually an audible break between tracks too).

Fellow streamer here. Do you happen to have favorite one-track no-break recordings of some of these works? I think there's a Rachmaninov Paganini Rhapsody with Earl Wild on Chesky that I enjoy, paired with Dohnanyi's Nursery Variations. The Naxos "People United Shall Never Be Defeated" is one track. Not so sure about Goldbergs or Diabellis.

[(poco) Sforzando]

Unpopular opinion: I really appreciate it when the Diabelli and Goldberg Variations are all put on one track instead of being split up into 34 and 32 of them respectively. (Maybe with the liner notes indicating index points I can skip to if I particularly want to hear one specific variation.) Even more so for Brahms's Paganini Variations and Rachmaninov's Rhapsody.

(This opinion at least seems to be pretty unpopular among record companies. >_>)

Unpopular among me too, as I do much of my listening in the car these days and my car CD player does not let me fast forward or reverse within a track. I can only locate the start of any track.

[North Star]

I have my Spotify account set for gapless playing.  It works, at least for the Premium subscription.  Don't know if this feature is available for the free version.

It certainly doesn't if they play ads between the music. And yeah, gapless players, and separate tracks is how I like it for sets of small pieces or variations, but somewhat arbitrary splitting of movements is not ideal.

[Pat B]

It is frequent and tolerable with shorter sets of variations but I really dislike it with longer ones. Although the only one I recall was the first CD version of Gould's 1981 reording of the GBV. It probably had index points but not many players could access them in the late 1980s/early 1990s.

My family's first CD player, a changer from a late-80s Sony rack system, had an index display and an index-forward (but not index-back) button. None of my subsequent players have had either. Progress! I understand why index points never caught on, but they would have been a boon for classical (and maybe jazz and prog-rock) listeners.

[Jo498]

I do not remember exactly but my first players might have had index display but certainly not any index manipulation, so that Gould Goldberg I had borrowed from a friend had to listened through in toto... I also recall that the Gelber Beethoven sonatas on Denon had index points within the movements, e.g. for development and recap.
As far as I remember one reason for 1-track 32-index GBV was that some players could not handle too many tracks but I am not sure

[Parsifal]

I do not remember exactly but my first players might have had index display but certainly not any index manipulation, so that Gould Goldberg I had borrowed from a friend had to listened through in toto... I also recall that the Gelber Beethoven sonatas on Denon had index points within the movements, e.g. for development and recap.
As far as I remember one reason for 1-track 32-index GBV was that some players could not handle too many tracks but I am not sure

The original red book definition do the CD specifies up to 99 tracks. My original 1985 pressing of Pinnock's Goldberg variations on DGG Archiv had 32 tracks. I think in those days a lot of tracks was considered a disadvantage. The ability to play long stretches of uninterrupted music was a selling point of CDs. My original Karajan alpine symphony disc had 1 hour of music and a single track.

[amw]

Fellow streamer here. Do you happen to have favorite one-track no-break recordings of some of these works? I think there's a Rachmaninov Paganini Rhapsody with Earl Wild on Chesky that I enjoy, paired with Dohnanyi's Nursery Variations. The Naxos "People United Shall Never Be Defeated" is one track. Not so sure about Goldbergs or Diabellis.

I'm not aware of any Goldbergs or Diabellis—Charles Rosen's Diabellis I have as a single track but that's from a LP rip someone on the internet made and posted on archive.org. (I'm not aware of a CD release, but if there is one, it's probably in multiple tracks.) The Rachmaninov Concertos on Brilliant also come with a one-track Paganini Rhapsody performed by I think Mikhail Rudy, which has become my go-to version. As well, all the Brahms variation sets in the Katchen Decca recordings are in single tracks (and the Andreas Boyde set on Oehms has a compromise approach where they are divided into tracks but each one contains several variations).

[Jo498]

The original red book definition do the CD specifies up to 99 tracks. My original 1985 pressing of Pinnock's Goldberg variations on DGG Archiv had 32 tracks. I think in those days a lot of tracks was considered a disadvantage. The ability to play long stretches of uninterrupted music was a selling point of CDs. My original Karajan alpine symphony disc had 1 hour of music and a single track.

But as has been pointed out this is not generally a problem with CD players because they do not interrupt when a new track starts. Maybe it was a problem with some of the early players although I do not recall such problems. It was only when we started playing CDs in computers and burning copies in the late 1990s that the problem of brief pauses between tracks showed up.

[Abuelo Igor]

I really hate it when long, multi-movement tracks are offered on a single CD track, because it means that, if you get interrupted and have to press "stop", you either have to start from the beginning or else fast forward to a point you probably don't remember anymore.

I really don't know why CD authorship should be changed to suit the taste buds of those who prefer digital, "non-physical" formats. Reading some of the opinions here, it looks like some forum members miss the days when record labels like Decca released albums like Charles Dutoit's "Daphnis and Chloe" on a single track.

As someone else said, it's not the CDs' fault, but rather the kind of imperfect digital interfaces that nobody has bothered to improve.

[Madiel]

It's simply a case of not bothering to start loading the beginning of the next track ahead of time.

Which undoubtedly can be done. I've got a CD player from 1992 that knows in shuffle mode how to start getting the next track ready to play. And iTunes knows how to do it. But there are a bunch of services out there where the programmers haven't ever bothered to figure it out.

And so they will sit there, happy that they've loaded the whole of the track that you're listening to right now, and do no work for the following track. Basically that gap you hear is the electronic equivalent of "Oh shit, you wanted something else after that?! Just a moment."

And it's not as if it's a problem unique to classical music. There are plenty of pop albums where one track blends into another.