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Several months ago, I spent several weekends doing the complete works of Rachmaninov, to include a fine video with English subtitles of one of his one-act operas. You can search my FReeper handle to get that month’s worth of work.

The recording of the “Star Spangled Banner” was taken from an Ampico piano roll. Rachmaninov recorded dozens of these rolls, and the reproduction of his dynamics is excellent for a mechanical medium.

Two of the pieces from that effort are deserving of a re-post. One is the original complete 1929 recording of Sergei playing his own Second Concerto with Stokowski on the podium of the Philadelphia Orchestra. It was recorded in RCA’s studio in an old church in Camden, NJ. For early electric direct-to-disk technology, it still sounds pretty decent.

Rachmaninov: Piano Concerto #2 in C minor

This link is a shock. An amateur took Rachmaninov’s 1934 recording of the Paganini Rhapsody with Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra and re-mastered it himself. It’s better than RCA’s 1973 re-mastering for the Rachmaninov Centennial Edition and sounds like it was recorded recently. I sent the link to Adam Neiman, one of the best young Rachmaninov pianists in the game, and he was blown away by the quality.

Rachmaninov: Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini

In the original posting, I told the story of my mother’s encounter with Rachmaninov in 1936 when she was a star-struck teenager teaching herself piano. I also did analyses of both pieces.

Thank you so much for those links. The sound quality is wonderful, considering the technology of the times.

I am struck by the slightly “peppier” tempo than some of my more recent recordings of the 2nd Concerto. It seems that Rachmaninoff liked it a wee bit brighter, if not faster. Do you know if he indicated metronome numbers on his pieces?

Also...if you know of a recording of him doing his prelude in Cm, I would love to hear it!

Are you familiar with the recordings done on the Welte Forsetzer? That was a machine with 88 metal “fingers” that captured a lot of nuance in the days before electronic recording techniques. I used to listen to a radio program YEARS ago that played these recordings.