Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Hear Rachy Play A Bosie - This Is Awesome!

Hi, There.

If you love Rachmaninoff and would like to hear him playing his own compositions - you can hear him playing them here on a Bosendorfer 290SE reproducing piano:

S.Rachmaninoff A Window in Time Disk #1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hv2zh_Z0Io

Apparently some type of new technique made this possible.

What a gift!

An aside: This reminds me of a tour my husband and I took some years ago to a wonderful music box museum in Maine (sadly closed now). Music boxes of all types, sizes and kinds were the main event there, but the grand finale of the tour was a performance by Rachy on one of those old time pianos that had a paper roll that reproduced Rachy's performance.

Jeanne W

Amazing, thanks for posting.

This is a transfer from a piano roll, which is likely to be Ampico. It is difficult to know how much processing has been added. The piano roll had limitations in terms of pedalling and dynamics and part of that was added subsequently by the editor. The very fine nuances in the recording seems to indicate an additional post processing. Some parts seems a bit artificial and too virtuosic. So it is a great document, but i am not sure how really accurate that is.

You can compare with this version from Naxos which sounds more natural and also more consistent.

https://youtu.be/wXQCPAR0EHo

I do not see what is particularly special about hearing these old recordings transferred to a Boesendorfer. The audio quality may be better than older recordings but that is not, at least for me, a big deal. These Rachmaninov recordings have been available for at least 50 years. I heard them all as a child on long playing records my piano teacher bought for me.

That CD is actually pretty old...I have it in my collection, purchased many years ago. I just pulled it off the shelf and blew off the dust. The flip side of the Telarc disk gives the copyright as 1998. Telarc used to be one of my favorite labels, with lots of classical releases with noticeably superior quality sound. Not sure if they are still around. The CD sleeve also states, in typical Telarc fashion, that the recording was mastered in 20-bit...but of course when it is put on a "regular" CD it goes down to 16.

The program notes to the CD describe the process how the Ampico rolls were first translated to computer data, which was then used to drive the electronic reproducing piano invented by Wayne Stahnke (who personally processed the data for this project). His system used solenoids instead of pneumatics to drive the keys, but he states that when he translated the data, he modeled the performance of the pneumatic system to better imitate the original.

Sorry I don’t like slang for Rachmaninoff or Bösendorfer.

I'm with you on this, and on other "cutesy" names for composers.

Regards,

Same for me.

Same for me. I think they sound pretentious or disrespectful or juvenile(as if the poster thinks they are on a first name basis with the composer).

Learux, Sidokar, pianoloverus, scriabinfanatic, Lakeviewsteve, BruceD:

Thank you for commenting.


Lakeviewsteve, BruceD, Sidokar, pianolaverus:

Regarding my abbreviations of Rachmaninov and Bosendorfer: PianoWorld is a place we can "talk" to each other, hopefully in a respectful manner. I appreciate your taking the time to comment and am thinking about what you said. I was excited about being able to hear Rachmaninov perform his own music and thought PianoWorld members who may not already know of this recording would enjoy listening, so I decided to post here.

Not spelling out Rachmaninov and Bosendorfer was mostly the result of my trying to shorten the title of my post. I did not realize abbreviating the names might be offensive or considered to be juvenile.


pianolaverus:

You commented about whether there is anything particularly special about hearing Rachmaninov's old recordings played on a Bosendorfer. In response I offer the following.

Some years ago a group of us PianoWorld members toured Frederick's Historic Piano Study Center in Ashburnham, Massachusetts. (Fantastic tour! Fantastic place!)

During the tour, Patricia Frederick played the same piece of music on several different makers pianos. She did this to demonstrate how differently the same piece of music, played by the same performer, can sound just by being played on a different type of piano. It was a revelation! The individual character of the pianos certainly did make a significant difference in how the music came across.

I therefore believe there is value in hearing Rachmaninov recordings played on a Bosendorfer. Granted, some pianos sound more similar to each other than others. I suppose that, too, has some value.

As Rich Gallassini would say, just my 2 cents.

Jeanne W

I certainly hope that no one was actually taking offense at your writing of the names as you did; I for one did not. I just wanted to say that I don't particularly like it when some posters regularly do this, but this is a free forum to write (within reason and within the guidelines) as one pleases.

Regards,

Hi Jeanne,

Certainly nothing is offensive in your post, irrespective of the reasons why you used short names. This forum is free to say and write whatever you want within the guidelines and usual rules of good behavior. My quick comment was just to mention that sometimes i see posts where short names are used and i dont see what is the purpose of it.

It is always interesting to listen to old recordings, so thank you for posting this one. The only issue, as i mentionned is that it is difficult to evaluate the amount of processing involved in it and how much of it has been modified or enhanced vs the original. Take care.