Search - Ludwig van Beethoven, Artur Schnabel :: Beethoven: Piano Works, Vol. 3

As good as it gets

J Scott Morrison | Middlebury VT, USA | 02/05/2003

(5 out of 5 stars)

"If you're looking at this page, you must already know that for many people and for seven decades, Schnabel's Beethoven Society recordings of the piano works have been the benchmark against which all others have subsequently been measured. These pioneering recordings have had many incarnations and currently here at Amazon alone one can find the complete set on Pearl, EMI and Classico d'Oro. Now Naxos is putting out their series, which will extend to nine volumes for the sonatas and two more for other piano works. Wizard recording producer Mark Obert-Thorn tracked down multiple sets of the rare 78 rpm discs in Britain, America and France and took the best he could find to make these new recordings. He got rid of things like pops and clicks while leaving in a soupçon of surface noise (even between movements - just like there would have been on the old 78s).I needn't comment about the performances. Volumes have already been written about them. I suspect you're more interested in the sound quality. I've heard pressings from the Pearl and EMI sets. These new Naxos versions are superior to them, although the Pearls are a close second. And then there's the price. Can't be beat. Only one caveat: you may wish to wait until the whole set is complete and buy them in a boxed set."

It's better on the Pearl editions

A techno geek | Kihei, Maui, HI USA | 12/18/2005

(2 out of 5 stars)

"With the high praise given in other reviews about the sound of these reissues, I ordered the set with great expectations. I regret to report that the sound is badly dulled by the engineer's filtering. While not as dull as the original LP or EMI CD releases, if you compare it to the Pearl releases of the mid 1990s, you will see what is lost. The Pearl series sounds unfiltered --- it has the greatest surface noise, but for the first time you can actually hear the sparkle and vibrancy of Schnabel's piano --- almost like a modern recording with a lot of noise. That sparkle gives the music a psychoacoustic aliveness that is profoundly important to the emotional impact. The engineering of the Naxos series puts the musician behind a veil of 70 years. The Pearl series brings Schanbel into your room now. The mind can filter out the surface noise and hear the vibrancy present. Perhaps someday computers will be able to do this for us. But this is not to be found in this Naxos series. As to the performances --- I can focus on the sound, because the performances are simply essential to any lover of Beethoven; when I sit down and close my eyes and listen, Schnabel more than any interpreter evokes a stream of images, moments, characters, feelings, and indescribable stories that inhabit Beethoven's musical world. But use Amazon's advanced search to find the Pearl editions of these recordings."