wagner tubas, audacity and LAME
To mark its 120th anniversary, the Concertgebouw Orchestra has made a number of its recordings available to download as MP3’s.
One of the recordings is of a performance the orchestra gave in 2005 of Bruckner’s 8th symphony, under Bernard Haitink. This clip is the last 3 and a half minutes or so of the 3rd movement. It’s a heavenly peroration for 4 Wagner tubas. There are not many opportunities to hear this beautiful instrument, unless you’re willing to sit through the ear-treacle which is Wagner opera, which is a crying shame.
To make this clip, I used the open-source freeware program ‘Audacity’ (downloaded from Sourceforge). To be able to save your selections as MP3’s, you will also need the LAME MP3 encoder, which you’ll find under ‘Optional downloads’ on the same download page as Audacity.
