Album Reviews

This performance and recording with Eiji Oue conducting the Minnesota Orchestra emphasizes the "symphonic" while downplaying the "dance" aspects of Rachmaninoff's composition.

This performance and recording with Eiji Oue conducting the Minnesota Orchestra emphasizes the "symphonic" while downplaying the "dance" aspects of Rachmaninoff's composition.

Keith O. Johnson's perspective is unusually distant, even for him, placing the listening perspective way back in the hall, with the orchestra bathed in hall acoustics, though his trademarked super-wide soundstage remains in place. This gives the entire production an almost dream-like character, perhaps obliged by the conductor's reading and the orchestra's stupendous performance that has a Stravinsky-like feel.

A few readers accustomed to David Hancock's closely miked version recorded in a small, relatively dry hall with Donald Johanos conducting the Dallas Symphony have emailed to complain about this record, saying it's dark and distant. "Distant," yes. But "dark"? No!

 Of course you won't hear the same level of detail here, or the other recording's incredible transient and rhythmic swagger, but that wasn't the intent of either Johnson or Oue and I'm not even sure it was Rachmaninoff's! I am not enough of a musical historian to know, but something tells me Rachmaninoff, who wrote this piece in 1940, had this kind of interpretation more in mind than what Johanos produced, exciting though that one is.

In any case, this reading is the deepest I've heard on record and while Johnson's recorded perspective is distant, the instrumental balance borders on outright perfection, the harmonic balance is equally so, and the dynamics and bass weight are staggering. 

If your system has the power reserves and low frequency response necessary  to reproduce them, the macro dynamics and bottom end in this recording are sensational but more importantly, the string sound is sensation and the profusion of orchestral colors remarkable. The sense of being in the hall (well back of course) and hearing it live is palpable.