Sergei Rachmaninoff - Rachmaninoff Plays Rachmaninoff: Zenph Re-performance
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Free Music Notes for Rachmaninoff Plays Rachmaninoff: Zenph Re-performance
Free Music Review: Buyer Beware
Hit: 3 Stars
Yes, it's true. This is a ripoff. I, too, was expecting an SACD. The back label says DSD, but this is only a standard CD. Very misleading. You've been warned.Free Music Review: Where is the SACD??
Hit: 3 Stars
I am really disapointed that Sony dropped SACD, I was expecting this recording to be on SACD. The performance is superb.Free Music Review: What happend to SACD?
Hit: 3 Stars
All previous Zenph releases have been dual SACD and Redbook. What happened to the SACD layer?Free Music Review: Something missing - passion
Hit: 2 Stars
Let's take the best known piece in the set - Prelude in C# Minor. Listen to this recording then listen to the version on the RCA Red Label Complete Recordings set (Disk 10). Next try the one on the "Rachmaninoff Plays Rachmaninoff" on the Laserlight label. Finally listen to the one on "A Window in Time" collection - another digital reproduction but taken from piano rolls rather than the 78 disks. Now go back and listen to this one again. It comes across as flat and lifeless in comparison to any one of the other three versions. It just doesn't have any dynamic passion. It sounds like it was played by a robot that was programmed to imitate human emotion but is incapable of feeling it. That absence of feeling is very apparent here. Somehow the folks at Telarc managed to capture it in the "A Window in Time" recreation - you never get the feeling that there is anything other than a human pianist, (and a great one at that), sitting at the keyboard. Here - sorry to say, not so much. To borrow, and bend, a quote from the movie Seven Year Itch: "It did not shake me, it did not quake me, it did not make me feel goose-pimply all over." Rachmaninoff really ought to - don't you think?Free Music Review: Avoid
Hit: 1 Stars
Zenph has some interesting technology and spends a lot on promoting itself. That said, this release is terrible.
Except for arguably one track (the Etude-Tableau op. 33 no. 2), it's missing all sense of color, passion, life, and music. It is dead notes played insensitively on a machine. To back up my claim of insensitivity, I will ask the listener to check out the "Headphone Experience" tracks, and to listen only to the notes on the "bass clef" side of the piano. (Listen to and follow only these notes, as an experiment.) Hear what I mean? Those notes are completely dead. Now listen to Rachmaninoff's *actual* recordings. Everything comes to life.
The recording of the mechanical piano itself is nice, although the piano produces a small tone, like that of a well-tuned creamy upright, played by a person of moderate power.
Note that many of these tracks are duplicates of pieces Rachmaninov played on Ampico piano player rolls that are already available in modern sound. The differences range from small to nonexistent. Why not provide recordings only of pieces that are NOT available on piano roll recordings? (Kriesler's "Love's Joy"? Again? Why not the preludes op. 23 no. 10 and op. 32 no. 3 - or op. 32 nos. 5 and 12? BOTH Krieslers?)
Note also that the disc repeats all its repertory! We get half a disc. The small handful of pieces that we get, are entirely repeated in the Headphone Experience, which, as stated, shows off these recordings to worse effect. Brazen short weight.
Of course Rachmaninov's musicality is not in question. He simply is badly represented here. The technology is not worthless (as stated, that Etude-Tableau shows some advantages over the original recording, which is surprisingly rough). But, this disc basically is worthless.