Mahler Symphony No. 2 "Resurrection". Claudio Abbado in 2003 conducts the Lucerne Festival Orchestra & the Orfeón Donostiarra (Chorus Master José Antonio Sainz Alfaro). Soloists are soprano Eteri Gvazava and contralto Anna Larsson. Directed for TV by Michael Beyer. Released 2010, EuroArts claimed that the disc has 5.1 dts-HD Master Audio surround sound, but see comments below. Grade: D
Video resolution, PQ, and the performance (including nice soloists) on this disc were good considering the age of the recording. But this product had serious technical problems. First, it froze on the Oppo BDP-83 Blu-ray player and maybe on other players. This problem was eventually solved, at least for Oppo owners, when Oppo released new firmware. Another problem was that the 5.1 dts-HD Master Audio surround sound track was in fact just a stereo soundtrack reworked for "surround." The final product did not have the fidelity and dynamic range that the Blu-ray product provides. This was caught by customers and apparently admitted by EuroArts. But the killer is that the disc suffers from a devastating case of DVDitis with few large-scale shots, many conductor and conductor-over-backs angles, and many instrument-only clips. Why bother with this when there are multiple better choices? You should not buy this title unless you have a special reason.
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