Dvorak: Symphony No. 9 (Vinyl) – Seiji Ozawa

Seiji Ozawa’s arrival in 1970 as music director of the San Francisco Symphony was later vividly described by Barack Obama: “with his mop haircut, and his turtlenecks, and his love beads, he almost looked like a Beatle”. This May 1975 recording of Dvořák’s New World Symphony was one of the last to be made quadraphonically by Philips and specially remixed for this reissue.

For this release Rainer Maillard at Emil Berliner Studios has used the original, four-track quadraphonic master tape to make a new stereo mix sent directly to the cutter head. This preserves a pure analogue path throughout. The Philips engineers of the 1970s would similarly have mixed the four front and rear channels before cutting but this downmix would have resulted in a two-track stereo copy for mastering, whereas here the lacquer is cut directly from a ‘live’ mix into stereo from the four Quad channels.