correctly-sized-image

Beethoven / Haydn / The Heifetz-Piatigorsky Concerts

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin

Reviews and Commentaries for Recordings Featuring Jascha Heifetz

This is a lovely sounding pressing of cello and violin, with smooth, natural, tonally-correct sound and correctly-sized instruments, something you don’t hear often on recordings with Heifetz. They tend to have huge violins and small orchestras.

In these chamber works perhaps the engineers had an easier time of getting it right.

The sound is transparent, spacious and three-dimensional in the best Living Stereo tradition.

If you love the sound of violin and cello, played by virtuosi of the highest order, this is the record for you.

Side One

Beethoven: Piano Trio, Op. 1, No. 1

Side Two

Haydn: Divertimento for Cello and Orchestra 
Rozsa: Tema con Variazioni

This is an older classical/orchestral review

Most of the older reviews you see are for records that did not go through the shootout process, the revolutionary approach to finding better sounding pressings we started developing in the early 2000s and have since turned into a veritable science.

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The Grieg Piano Concerto – With a Correctly Sized Piano for a Change

More of the music of Edvard Grieg (1843-1907)

This Shaded Dog pressing has exceptionally lively and dynamic sound on side two, which earned an A++ grade and plays quietly to boot.

The sound is BIG and BOLD enough to fill up your listening room and then some.

The piano is clean and clear, the strings are rich and textured.

And his performance of this work is superb, as is his performance of the shorter coupling works on side two (which actually have the best sound here). 

This is wonderfully recorded music. It has a very natural orchestral perspective and superb string tone.

It also boasts a correctly-sized piano, which is quite unusual for Rubinstein’s recordings in our experience.

Some of the titles we’ve auditioned that had noticeably over-sized imaging can be found here.

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Beethoven and Richter – Our Favorite Performance on Vinyl

More of the Music of Ludwig van Beethoven

  • A stunning copy of this wonderful concerto performance that boasts a Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) side two mated to a solid Double Plus (A++) side one, and reasonably quiet vinyl for a Shaded Dog from 1961
  • This pressing has the real Living Stereo magic in spades, but unlike most of the RCA concerto recordings, Richter, the brilliant soloist featured here, is not overly spotlighted, hence the much more natural “concert hall” sound
  • The piano is part of the orchestra, and properly sized, allowing the contributions of the other musicians to be heard more clearly, laid out as they are so elegantly across a huge and deep Boston Symphony Hall stage

In orchestral music, when it comes to clarity there is nothing close to the sound of the live performance, but some records, this one especially, give you the sense that you are hearing it all. Audio may be an illusion but it can be a very convincing one.

The spaciousness and three-dimensionality of the recording are also exceptional. Through the efforts and skill of the RCA engineers, that striking openness in the recording is somehow combined with an electrifying immediacy in the sound of the piano, no mean feat. One rarely hears both, except of course live (and not always even then).

There may be other performances of merit, but I know of no recording of this music with better sound. If you are demonstrating naturalistic sound, not bombastic Hi-Fi spectacularity, this pressing more than qualifies as a Demo Disc.

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Shostakovitch / Piano Concerto Nos. 1 and 2 – Another Amazing Piano Concerto Discovery

More of the Music of Dmitri Shostakovich

  • This stunning classical release finally makes its Hot Stamper debut here with Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or very close to it throughout
  • Westminster is not a label that we typically associate with top quality sonics, but I knew from the moment I dropped the needle on an audition copy that the sound of this Hidden Gem could not be faulted
  • What made this the clear winner was not complicated – it’s solid and weighty like no other, with virtually no smear, situated in the biggest space, with the most energetic performances
  • Clear and transparent, with huge hall space extending wall to wall and floor to ceiling, this is a sound that the modern reissue, of any music, from any era, fails to reproduce utterly
  • A truly superb recording with huge, spacious, dynamic, lively sound – Tubey Magical richness is a big plus too
  • This to a top quality classical piano recording in every way

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