The Pristine remastering is clearly superior to the now out of print BBC Legends version.Greater impact,dynamics, and extension of bass and treble.
Here is PR blurb from Pristine quoting Horenstein's cousin, who apparently asked Andrew Rose for the mastring
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HORENSTEIN conducts Mahler and Wagner - PASC440
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HORENSTEIN conducts Mahler and Wagner - PASC440-CD
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Overview
Soloists, choirs et al
London Symphony Orchestra
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
Jascha Horenstein, conductor
Live and studio recordings, 1959 and 1962
Producer and XR Remastering: Andrew Rose
Cover artwork based on a photograph of Jascha Horenstein
WAGNER Der fliegende Holländer - Overture
WAGNER Tannhäuser - Bacchanale
WAGNER Siegfried Idyll Siegfried Idyll
MAHLER Symphony No. 8 in E flat Major ("Symphony of a Thousand")
Total duration: 2hr 1:13
©2015 Pristine Audio
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Horenstein's tremendous stereo Mahler 8 and Wagner in fabulous XR-remastered sound quality
"Horenstein marshalled his forces with magnificent aplomb and obtained a quite outstandingly fine performance" - Daily Telegraph
WAGNER Der fliegende Holländer - Overture [notes / score]
WAGNER Tannhäuser - Bacchanale [notes / score]
WAGNER Siegfried Idyll [notes / score]
Recording producer: Charles Gerhardt
Recording Engineer: Kenneth Wilkinson
Recorded 29-30 September 1962 for Reader's Digest
Walthamstow Town Hall
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
Jascha Horenstein, conductor
MAHLER Symphony No. 8 in E flat Major ("Symphony of a Thousand") [notes / score]
Joyce Barker (sop.I) - Magna Peccatrix
Beryl Hatt (sop.II) - Mater Gloriosa
Agnes Giebel (sop.III) - Una Poenitentium
Kirsten Meyer (alt.I) - Mulier Samaritana
Helen Watts (alt.II) - Maria Aegyptiaca
Kenneth Neate (ten.) - Doctor Marianus
Alfred Orda (bar.) - Pater Ecstaticus
Arnold van Mill (bass) - Pater Profundus
BBC Chorus; BBC Choral Society; Goldsmiths' Choral Union; Hampstead Choral Society; Emanuel School Boys' Choir; Orpington Junior Singers
Musical Associate: Berthold Goldschmidt
London Symphony Orchestra
Hugh Maguire, leader; Charles Spinks, organ
Jascha Horenstein, conductor
Recorded for BBC broadcast, 20 March 1959, Royal Albert Hall, London
Introduction to the broadcast by Deryck Cooke:
Historic Reviews
A DEDICATED PERFORMANCE OF MAHLER`S `EIGHTH`
Neville Cardus, The Guardian, 23rd March 1959
Mahler wrote of his cosmically-planned Eighth Symphony that in it the universe begins to vibrate and to sound. On Friday the Albert Hall was made more or less to vibrate with sound by 750 voices and instrumentalists engaged in a presentation of the work to an assembly which filled the enormous place from floor to topmost gallery. In the chorus were humans of all ages, children choiring like cherubim, more or less; venerable basses, and young girls at the spring of life. Eight soloists sustained the revolving world of Mahler`s aspirations standing there like supporting pillars. Jascha Horenstein controlled the apocalyptic structure firmly and purposefully, avoiding the occasional chasms and glimpses into vacancy, and scaling the heights without haste or waste of breadth.
At the end, the audience broke into tumultuous acclamation. Seldom, if ever, have I known in an English concert hall so tremendous a demonstration as this. No doubt Mahler`s apotheosis of heaven-storming brass and bells, heaven-arching sopranos and infant warblings, was partly responsible for the outbreak, but throughout the performance attention had been riveted and breathless, so we can assume that the roars of `Bravo` signified more than excitement due to an assault on the senses.
Horenstein encompassed the work with simple, impressive technical mastery. He indulged in no histrionic gestures. He did not attempt to persuade us that he was sharing with Mahler the labour pains of creation. He put himself devotedly at Mahler`s service, had faith in the music, and he had patience. It was a dedicated piece of conducting; indeed, the performance itself was dedicated and a great credit to all taking part. The young folk singing Mahler to Goethe`s German from the closing scene of `Faust` will surely remember this concert all their lives.
It is difficult in the Albert Hall for any conductor accurately to calculate nuance, subtle, change of tone. The wonderful finale, after a spell-bound intoning of the Chorus Mysticus - `Alles Vergangliches - All that is past of us` - failed to revoke the sense of floating rising melody when the `Mater Gloriosa` theme is wafted on the higher voices. The tempo was too deliberate. The dome of heaven was not revealed. There were no echoing reverberations. But Horenstein had no choice but to insist on the strictest rhythmical precision, no opportunity for the finest shading. He was conducting the symphony for the first time, with forces not familiar with words or music, which, in the Goethe section, might well have come to them as alien from contemporary English modes of thought, symbolism and feeling. There was, perhaps, a lack of string tension in the wonderful anchoritic orchestral introduction to Part 2; the familiar Mahler fingerprint of the appoggiatura and tremolo needed a more abandoned and passionate bowing.
Also, for want of the right understanding tenor, the beautiful if operatic invocation of Doctor Marianus short-circuited into sentimental prose. The only other important miscarriage in a remarkable performance was during the superb setting of Goethe`s terrific and elemental declamation by the Pater Profundus, from the depths. `Wie felsenabgrund mir zu Fussen -`At my feet a craggy chasm`. The fault was not so much the solo vocalist`s as one of orchestral playing a little over-careful.
But I make these critical points in no carping spirit. I wish only to be fair to Mahler, for magnificent though this interpretation was in bulk, it did not entirely give us the right voltage, the feeling of almost excruciating search for the right tone-symbols.
A remarkable point of Horenstein`s conducting is that he succeeded in holding together the first part, based on the medieval hymn, `Veni, Creator Spirits`, composed mainly in the starkest and most intricate polyphony, with challenges to high voices even more cruel than Beethoven`s in his choral apotheosis. Only by sweat of brow does Mahler invoke the Creator Spirit to dwell in our minds and strengthen our weak bodies. The aspiration is terrific, also the desperation.
The Latin text and the neo-classic vocal polyphony employed was not really instinctive in Mahler. We feel the release of strain as soon as Goethe enters, and the atmosphere of a German poetry and metaphysic is breathed. The work, in fact, is dichotomous; the two parts do not mingle, in spite of a closer thematic connection than is apparent even after much study of the score. For example, in three bars of the simple chorus of angels - the major themes of `Accende` and `Mater Gloriosa` are both sounded in some dozen notes.
The score is an amazing torrent of ideas, supplication, doubt, spiritual effort and exaltation wrestling like beasts with relaxations to quiet even miniature islands of escape, in which Mahler composes with a delicate touch prophetic of `Das Lied von der Erde`. At times, for instance, in the advent of the `Mater Gloriosa`, soaring on high, the violins and harp play the melody perilously saccharine and reminiscent of Gounod rather than Goethe.
But, all in all, Mahler in this work subdued his ego and by the will-to-believe, and out of his momentary ideal of universal brotherhood, composed his most objective music. A thousand pities that another performance could not follow at once on Friday`s, so closely did it get to the heart of the matter.
Langford should have been living to witness Mahler`s victory over thousands; he was the first to write of Mahler in this country nearly forty years ago. He was then alone in his advocacy.
750 PERFORM MAHLER'S 8th SYMPHONY: A VISION OF UNIVERSE
MARTIN COOPER, Daily Telegraph, 23 March 1959
Sheer size in the arts is not admired today and we ridicule the monster performances of the last century. Yet the magnitude of the forces employed by Mahler in his eighth symphony—not far short of a thousand— is a positive element in the character of the work.
The Albert Hall was crowded last night for a performance in which Jascha Horenstein conducted the London Symphony Orchestra, the B.B.C. Chorus and Choral Society, the Goldsmiths' Choral Union, the Hampstead Choral Society and two children's choirs— a total of over 750 performers.
The symphony is a vision of the metaphysical universe, a hymn of the whole creation, and its opening and closing choruses have a vast, cosmic quality hardly found in any other music.
Mahler's inspiration sometimes flags in between, but his intention never wavers even when its expression is theatrical (as in some of the solo hymns) or downright commonplace.
" FAUST " IMAGERY
Although the symphonic character of the music often disappears beneath the shifting, esoteric imagery of the second part of Goethe's " Faust " it still gives the work an underlying unity, which corresponds to Mahler's conception of the universe as intelligible and moral beneath the perpetual flux of exterior events.
Everything is extreme in the music. The range demanded of the voices is crueller than in Beethoven's Mass in D and the sonorities are either colossal or, at the other end of the scale, of a gossamer delicacy.
Mr. Horenstein marshalled his forces with magnificent aplomb and obtained a quite outstandingly fine performance. The strong octet of soloists included some unusually beautiful voices -- notably Joyce Barker, Agnes Giebel, Kerstin Meyer Kenneth Neate and Alfred Orda.
Producer's Note
I was urged by the conductor's cousin, Misha Horenstein, to tackle the BBC's splendid experimental stereo recording of Mahler's 8th Symphony, made with a single stereo microphone set-up in the vast, acoustically-untamed space of the Royal Albert Hall, in the hope that XR remastering might bring a greater focus and a better sense of the vastness of the forces employed. Perhaps a touch extra treble, depends on system etc. But more dynamics and presence indeed.
"I can't praise it highly enough. The difference is immediate from the opening bars, where the organ hits you where it should, in the stomach, but the gain is evident throughout. This is especially true of the bass line, which now has the depth and weight missing in the [previous issue]. Your remake also compliments the vertical and horizontal spaces of the Albert Hall, bringing the sound forward as though you are sitting in better seats than before..." came the response, to which I find little to add (beyond noting the high number of coughs I had to remove!).
https://www.pristineclassical.com/pasc440.html
