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Hey. . . This guy's good

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Posted on October 26, 2009 at 12:15:45
Chris from Lafayette
Audiophile

Posts: 1546
Location: SF Bay Area
Joined: February 17, 2004

I've just been listening to a CD of Rachmaninoff's Etude-tableaux Op. 39 and Corelli Variations Op. 42 played by Alexander Romanovsky, the Busoni Competition winner from 2001. As my subject line states above, this guy IS good: beautiful balance and clarity, wonderful tone (a well recorded Hamburg Steinway - congratulations, Decca!), and impressive range of dynamics. We're starting to get quite a collection of excellent performances of the Op. 39 Etudes-tableaux, with Romanovsky, Angelich, Ovchinnikov (cheap!), and Melnikov, as well as a whole raft of other pianists in some of the individual Etudes from this set.

I've got a YouTube link to one of Romanovsky's performances at the bottom of this post too (not that you can tell that much from YouTube streaming sound quality!) - a very interesting Bach transcription.

Now I'm noticing something really odd about the booklet cover, posted on October 29, 2009 at 16:38:59
Chris from Lafayette
Audiophile

Posts: 1546
Location: SF Bay Area
Joined: February 17, 2004
 On the booklet cover in my post above (I think it's from the Amazon.com link), you can see that it shows "Etudes-Tableaux Op. 33". This is quite clearly wrong, as Romanovsky definitely plays the Op. 39 set, not Op. 33. So I checked the actual CD, and the actual booklet cover (as opposed to the one in the link above) is correct: it shows Op. 39. So Decca must have corrected this mistake on the booklet cover before they released the actual CD.

RE: Hey. . . This guy's good, posted on October 29, 2009 at 00:36:38
Russell
Audiophile

Posts: 1908
Location: San Francisco, California
Joined: February 24, 2001
 I saw a sealed copy of this at Amoeba in Berkeley (in the new-arrivals bin on the counter) a couple of weeks or so ago and thought it was a curiosity, as I don't think it's been officially released in the US by Decca. (I remember this copy had one of those Italian-style security stickers on the back.) I passed on it then but I went back today to find it (after reading your enthusiastic review) but it was gone. Did you get that copy?

Russell

Yup - that was the copy I got :-) [nt], posted on October 29, 2009 at 10:27:30
Chris from Lafayette
Audiophile

Posts: 1546
Location: SF Bay Area
Joined: February 17, 2004

Aha--I knew it! ;-) (nt), posted on October 31, 2009 at 00:25:58
Russell
Audiophile

Posts: 1908
Location: San Francisco, California
Joined: February 24, 2001
 nt

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