Perhaps enough has already been said about the occasionally disturbing mis-match between sound and vision that can occur when an operatic film originally conceived for the effectively monaural medium of television is reissued for stereo listening and watching on CDV. It didn't bother me greatly here, partly no doubt because Gotz Friedrich's sensible production doesn't lend itself to too many cunning but ear-contradicting camera angles. The whole thing was post-synchronized, of course, but carefully done so that the sense of singers miming to their own voices is again not too worrying. What I did find problematical on this first exposure to CDV is something that may relate to digital recording in general, though the presence of pictures (sometimes of singers producing long high notes with no visible effort at all) points it up, the recorded balance certainly does. One expects the singers to be placed rather forward in an operatic recording (which doesn't mean to say that I'm grateful when that expectation is realized) but here they are very close, whether to suit Teresa Stratas (whose voice is not really Salome-sized) or the demands of television I am not too sure.
The ideal position for listening to a singing voice is not too close. A violin will sound disturbingly breathy, with a cloud of sympathetic resonance, if you hear it from only a few inches away, but a few feet further back these extraneous sounds are inaudible or at least in perspective. Much the same is true, I suspect, of voices. The nagging edge that many voices appear to have at close quarters was effectively filtered out by the inadequacies of the recording medium in the days of 78 rpm, and even analogue recording ameliorated it somewhat but the advent of digital seems to have coincided with an increasing use of close-microphoning, and the result has been that many voices sound harsher on digital CD than they ever did on LP, still less in real life.
I am convinced that digital recording, especially when it is transmitted with maximum fidelity through the medium of the Compact Disc demands a rethinking of how voices should be balanced. This, to be sure, is a digital remastering of an analogue original, but the exceptionally forward placing of the singers (Stratas's voice sounds at times closer than the screen from which she is apparently singing) makes for the overall sound that I find almost unbearable. The words are immaculately clear, of course (which is no excuse, by the way, for providing neither sub-titles nor printed libretto), and with a singing actress of Stratas's calibre (to say nothing of Astrid Varnay's bloodcurdling Herodias) this makes for an extreme directness of dramatic utterance. But the effect of every syllable being directed at you from a couple of feet away, compounded by the comparative remoteness of Bohm's orchestra, is to make the opera nerve-jangling in the wrong way.
It is a good production, mark you, with a stunningly effective use of moon-bleached colour (though the Dance of the Seven Veils is muffed, as usual) and it is very well-performed indeed. I wouldn't mind watching it again, but to listen to it again with pleasure would need a wholesale remixing of the sound.'