OMG.
I was hoping for this when I heard a 2-disk pack with a blu-ray was being issued but I assumed it would just be stereo-only. Pre-ordered.
These recordings are legendary just in stereo. Steinberg was one of those conductors who didn't get as much attention as his flashier colleagues but was held in the highest esteem by musicians. These recordings in particular are held to be among the best recordings of The Planets and Also Sprach Zarathustra ever, and they've been in print consistently snce their release.
Like almost all of the Boston Symphony recordings for Deutsche Grammophon from this period, these recordings were produced by Thomas Mowrey, whose active use of surround has been showcased on a number of Pentatone releases, including Leonard Bernstein's recording of Carmen, the Ozawa/Berlioz discs, and more. This likely isn't going to be a "hall ambience" recording - expect to hear discrete use of the rear channels in ways that are more aggressive than modern classical recordings.
I assumed we'd never get this one from Pentatone, and I was right - it's a recording that's sufficiently popular and important that DG wouldn't license it out. Instead they saw the demand and released it themselves.
And let that sink in - this is Universal Classics doing a quad remaster/reissue themselves. I'm not aware of this having been done before - the best we got was was a few upmixes of quad to 5.1 almost 15 years ago (Karajan Beethoven 9 & Mozart Requiem, Kleiber Beethoven 5+7, Pollini Chopin). There's so much more quad sitting in the vaults of Universal Classics - Not just Deutsche Grammophon but Decca too - hundreds of albums, many of which were only released in stereo. Pentatone did a pretty good job with the Philips vaults but they barely scratched the surface for DG. Now Universal is doing it themselves.
Universal has already been doing a program of box sets that include a blu-ray audio as well as CDs, but they've almost all been in stereo (the only previous one with multichannel has been the Kleiber orchestral set, which included the Beethoven 5th and 7th Symphonies, already reissued on SACD and DVD-A, along with upmixes of the Schubert and Brahms symphonies). There have been some great stereo-only ones - the Solti Ring Cycle, Kertesz doing Dvorak Orchestral Works (already OOP), the Takacs Quartet doing the Beethoven String Quartets, Maazel doing the Sibelius Symphonies, Solti/Ashkenazy in the Beethoven Piano Concertos, and both Karajan and Bernstein's Beethoven Symphony Cycles.
Let's hope this is only the beginning.
FYI, Thomas Mowrey's producing discography is here:
https://www.discogs.com/artist/272491-Thomas-Mowrey?filter_anv=0&subtype=Production&type=Credits (and he's said everything DG recorded from 1970-1975 was mixed for quad, although most other producers were making mixes that were more conservative)
