Reissue Roundup.(THE MUSIC)(Howard Hanson Conducts Howard Hanson)(Sound recording review)

This edition of Reissue Roundup will cover just two new reissues, one of which would have qualified for my Collector's Corner feature (soon to be renamed) until Universal surprised all of us by re-releasing one of the most sought-after recordings from its Mercury Living Presence series on CD. That doesn't tell the whole story, though.

The recordings of Howard Hanson with his Eastman-Rochester Orchestra had been reissued a decade ago in single CD releases collecting the symphonies and incidental works along with a 2-CD set entitled, The Composer And His Orchestra (434 370-2). This set offered his Piano Concerto, Mosaics and the Merry Mount Suite on one CD, and a collection of Hanson's talks about these works on the other. It is this collection that has had audiophiles and music collectors lining up to pay big prices on the Internet.

The new reissue is entitled Howard Hanson Conducts Howard Hanson (475 6867). This is a 4-CD box set that collects the three symphonies and the material appearing in "Composer" at mid-price. A thorough comparison with selections from the earlier 2-CD set confirms the notations in the booklet for the new release: these are, indeed, identical to those that Wilma Cozart Fine oversaw and endorsed. If you have the original releases of the symphonies and the 2-CD set then you need do nothing.

That being said, one of the most natural sounding recordings of orchestral music eve made is restored to the catalog. If you are an SACD enthusiast as I am, you probably had purchased the hybrid disk of the first two symphonies (475 6181) when Universal released it just a year ago. I recommend that you overlook this duplication (or sell the SACD) and buy this new reissue for the additional music before its publishers delete it again.

Audio Fidelity has reissued another Steve Hoffman special. This time around it's Deep Purple's Who Do We Think We Are (AFZ 027). As with everything that Mr. Hoffman touches, this recording reveals subtle pleasures those engineers at the big labels overlook. I did not have an original vinyl pressing of this one to compare, but there is little to quibble over here. Dynamic contrasts are as good as I've heard from studio recordings like this one; highly recommended.

It's time for another installment of Collector's Corner. This time around I'd like to mention a few recordings of what's generally called Bachelor Pad or Space Age Pop music. There is a web site that can provide interested readers with more information on this strange little genre: www.spaceagepop.com. Of course, these CDs are out of print (that's what qualifies them for this feature), but as Internet surfers know, finding something that's no longer available from your traditional record shop is just a mouse-click away.

The first of these is a series that RCA called The History of Space Age Pop. Released in 1995, the series capitalized on the ultra-lounge fad that had record companies reissuing hundreds of recordings of this ilk. What separates these from most of those others is their strange ...