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Editorial Reviews

This 10-disc box set, part of Sony/BMG's Complete Collections series, is a budget-priced repackaging of the 1992 RCA Gold Seal 10-CD set entitled Sergei Rachmaninoff: The Complete Recordings. It utilizes the identical analog-to-digital transfers -- which range from very good to exceptional, with some faint surface noise and other imperfections from the surviving sources -- and has all of the same musical and sonic virtues (and flaws) as that older release. The main difference is that instead of listing for around $100, it works out to about $5.50 a disc, or just a shade over half the price, and it takes up a lot less space on one's shelf. The pianistic and musical virtues of the recordings -- especially the preludes and etudes, and the vintage 1924 recording of the "Second Piano Concerto" -- are the same, and beyond reproach. That said, the label missed out on getting this reissue 100% right with a poorly designed accompanying booklet -- somehow, in the space of 40 pages of text, none of the people who worked on this package thought to include a single recording date on any of the dozens and dozens of performances included here, covering a period from 1919 through 1942 -- that's 23 years, and at least one major change in recording technology in the middle, from acoustic to electrical recording; just as an example, unless one knew the history of the recordings at hand, a listener would be hard-put to understand the differences between, say, the two different versions of the "Second Piano Concerto" included here, one done acoustically in 1924 and the other with electrical microphones in 1929. It all seems a little stupid as an oversight, especially as all of this information was present in the booklet accompanying the original set, and it seems as though someone -- an intern who could read English -- at an organization as big as Sony/BMG could have spent the 45 minutes it would have taken to transfer that information to this set. Still, it is a bargain, if not as enticing, informative, or easy to use as it could have been. Bruce Eder, All Music Guide

Customer Reviews

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