Album Notes

Rachmaninoff's own "reduction for two pianos" is in these concertos. The sheet music for this is printed by BOOSEY & HAWKES and it is probably normally used either by pianists for practice or by music lovers who like to follow the score while listening to the music. It is believed that Rachmaninoff wrote Piano 2 as a "sketch of the orchestra" rather than a reproduction of it and it is clearly on a completely different plane from works such as "Suite No.1, No.2" that was composed for 2 pianos. But how many people have actually heard the "sound" that this score offers. It highlights the "core" taken from the tremendous impact of the orchestra and it can be easily understood from this how Rachmaninoff constructed music.

A recording by Michael Nanasakov took place in Hyogo Prefecture on January 29th and 30th, 2009. Nanasakov was supposedly born in Lietuvos Respublika in 1955 but I am sure that there is no one who still believes this. This was actually a joke by the producer (Junichi Nanasawa) who introduced Nanasakov as a Virtual Pianist in 1991. It is, in actual fact, a hall recording using a computer and a mechanical piano that finally took place after staggeringly lengthy repetitions of trial and error. But let's leave it that Nanasakov is a real person. It's more fun that way.

This recording was Nanasakov's first multiple recording with Piano 1 and Piano 2 being recorded separately before being mixed but, as it is basically a "Computer Performance of Piano Music", the range of alignment in the timing of the 2 pianos is extremely small and they really sound like they are playing in concert. Normally the notes of 2 pianos can be heard to intertwine to form a complete sound but, in contrast to mixing, multiple recordings can, for example, easily create a compiled version of each single piano sound on a separate track. I'm not sure if this is useful for documentation purposes or not…