Producer David Frost, who has won the award before, earned a 2020 Grammy nominee for Best Producer for this recording of Holst's The Planets, Op. 32, and anyone who has received some high-end stereo equipment as a holiday gift would do well to seek the album out. The production, featuring Reference Recordings founder Keith O. Johnson at the head of the engineering team, is superb. It's true that The Planets tends to attract audiophile production, but this one ranks near the top of the available versions, and its virtues ...
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Producer David Frost, who has won the award before, earned a 2020 Grammy nominee for Best Producer for this recording of Holst's The Planets, Op. 32, and anyone who has received some high-end stereo equipment as a holiday gift would do well to seek the album out. The production, featuring Reference Recordings founder Keith O. Johnson at the head of the engineering team, is superb. It's true that The Planets tends to attract audiophile production, but this one ranks near the top of the available versions, and its virtues will be evident even to listeners with less rarefied equipment. A sampling of the second movement, "Venus, the Bringer of Peace," will demonstrate the awesome clarity and transparency Frost and Johnson bring to the symphony's individual lines, working in the Kansas City Symphony's Helzberg Hall. Seating just 1,600, this is one of the finest small halls in the U.S. acoustically, and it has perhaps never been as ideally exploited as it is here. The performance by the Kansas City Symphony...
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