LATEST ADDITIONS

My DACs are taking naps. I have not played music from a digital source in at least 12 weeks. I'm having too much fun playing records from the '50s and '60s with period-correct phono cartridges and listening to 100-year-old 78s at the Hot Club of New York.

I was heading back home to New York in my old Mercedes diesel on a Sunday evening, having just attended the annual Capital Audiofest near Washington, DC. Riding shotgun was fellow Stereophile scribbler Ken Micallef, and as we puttered along the straight, featureless lower half of the New Jersey Turnpike, we started to reminisce about our audio show experiences.

When this feature premiered in 1991, it was intended as a list of recordings that were, in the words of Richard Lehnert, the music editor at the time, "both musically and sonically impeccable—in other words, the best, the tops, to die for."

David and Alma Wilson must be doing something right. They've been married for 50 years, and for 36 years, they've owned and operated Accent on Music on Main Street in Mount Kisco, New York, about an hour north of New York City.

"You should come to CAF," Ken Micallef said. He has been saying this for what seems like decades. "It's cool, smaller and more manageable than AXPONA. You'll like it."

Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde
Marie-Nicole Lemieux, contralto; Andrew Staples, tenor. Les Siècles, François-Xavier Roth, cond.
Harmonia Mundi HMM 902740 (CD; reviewed as 24/96). 2026. Jiri Heger, prod., eng.
Performance *****

Erin Morley & Lawrence Brownlee: Golden Age; Elena Firsova & Dmitri Smirnov: Love And Loss; Ben-Haim: Symphony No.2, Israel Philharmonic/Lahav Shani; Mahler: Symphony No.7, National Symphony Orchestra/Gianandrea Noseda.