Sold Date: January 25, 2021
Start Date: January 24, 2021
Final Price: £24.99 (GBP)
Seller Feedback: 3458
Buyer Feedback: 0

About 20 years ago I bought the complete backroom vinyl stock of a Hi Fi shop that was closing down. These were mainly well reviewed classical lps in their full priced versions, many first pressings from the 70s to the 1990s. I am now listing some of the sealed examples for the first time this week , about 70 of them. These were quality control checked in the shop and then sealed in house for eventual sale, and those I have had for myself are all pristine and unmarked, flat and not off centre, playing perfectly, so were not the demonstration stock. They are mainly the late vinyl Decca's, plus some Phillips and EMI, so I have saved some of the best until last. Best available version (sealed 1st press) of the best account of this great work.  Look at the glowing review of this: From those of its recordings which I have heard, I judge that the Montreal Symphony Orchestra has become a world-class orchestra under Charles Dutoit's conductorship. It certainly sounds like one in this superlative recording of The Planets, which now seems to me to be the best available on both LP and CD, displacing Karajan's on DG. Recorded in St Eustache, Montreal, the acoustic lends just enough extra resonance and brilliance to the string tone. But the accuracy and understanding of the playing are outstanding in themselves—the surge of organ-tone in ''Mars'' and the strings' swirling crescendo at fig. 11 in the same movement, the exquisitely placed final note of ''Venus'' and the secure playing by the solo horn and oboe, the brilliant fleet-footedness of ''Mercury'' and the agile woodwind in ''Jupiter'', where the big tune flows broadly and unselfconsciously. In ''Saturn'', the best movement, the atmospheric start is chilling and continues throughout Holst's vision of old age in all its creaking terror. Last and emphatically not least, after a gloriously lively ''Uranus'', the problematical ''Neptune'' is played with Gallic refinement, the distant voices are perfectly balanced and maintain pitch as they fade from our hearing. Women's voices, too, I am glad to say, not children's, as in the rival Andrew Davis version on EMI from Toronto.