Search - Franz Liszt, George Pehlivanian, Residentie Orkest :: Louis Lortie plays Liszt

Promising But Disappointing!

Frederick Baptist | Singapore | 02/06/2009

(2 out of 5 stars)

"Louis Lortie is not the best ever to play Liszt but his work is certainly competent enough and his work here is not the reason for my disappointment. The box-set itself is well designed and assembled and the cardboard sleeves used to house the 3 discs are well assembled too although I would have liked to have plastic inner sleeves to better protect the discs from scratches but as I am able to purchase these separately myself and so even with this point I'm not disappointed. The 43 page booklet with great liner notes and essays on the composer and the works included here is also well put together. Even the content is not at fault although I would have liked perhaps a 4th disc with the Hungarian Rhapsodies G359, the Sonata in Bm G178 and the Rigoletto Paraphrace G434 included.



The problem is, however, with the extremely disappointing sound quality which is advertised as coming from a DDD source remastered digitally in 24/96 kHz. I have many other classical cds coming from even AAD sources that have been remastered and that sound much, much clearer and better than the 3 discs here! Either they lied or the sound engineer should be shot!



This is the first and the last Chandos Classic product that I'm getting until they can prove to me that the sound quality is decent enough for any future releases. At this point, I cannot trust them to do justice to any of the great composers' works if this is the best that they can do from remastering DDD source material.



Highly NOT recommended."