Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Frederic Chopin Available Now
There are some wonderful Musical Heritage Society records sitting in the bins of your local record store or Goodwill, and this one is worth picking up just to hear how well recorded the piano is.
We described it this way:
Beautiful piano. The most natural and realistic mix with the piano not in the foreground.
But there is more to the recording than the sound of the piano.
Smeary, bloated and dry orchestra holds it back.
Well, at least we tried. (Note that side two was deemed not worth grading.)
Our favorite recording for performance and sound is the Living Stereo from 1961, LSC 2575, with Rubinstein at the piano and Skrowaczewski conducting the New Symphony Orchestra of London.
This is what we had to say about the sound of our Shootout Winner:
We love the huge, solid and powerful sound of the piano on this recording. This piano has weight and heft. As a result, it sounds like a real piano.
For some reason, a great many Rubinstein recordings are not capable of reproducing those seemingly all-important qualities in the sound of the piano.
Those are, as I hope everyone understands by now, the ones we don’t sell. If the piano in a piano concerto recording doesn’t sound solid and powerful, what is the point of playing such a record?
Or, to be more accurate, what is the point of an audiophile playing such a record? (Those of you who would like to avoid bad sounding vintage classical and orchestral records have come to the right place. We’ve compiled a very long list of them for precisely that purpose, and we add to it regularly.)
No doubt Kenneth Wilkinson made sure the recording captured the weight of the piano he was listening to as it played all those years ago in the wonderful acoustics of Kingsway Hall.
The strings have lovely Living Stereo (Decca-engineered) texture as well.
As befits a Wilkinson recording from 1961, there is no shortage of clarity to balance out the Tubey Magical warmth and richness.
When you add in the tremendous hall space, weight and energy, this becomes a Demo Disc orchestral recording by any standard.
Testing
Lately we have been writing quite a bit about how pianos are good for testing your system, room, tweaks, electricity and all the rest, not to mention turntable setup and adjustment.
- We like our pianos to sound natural (however one chooses to define the term).
- We like them to be solidly weighted.
- We like them to be free of smear, a quality that is rarely mentioned in the audiophile record reviews we read.
Further Reading