Track Listing

1. Promenade
2. Gnomus
3. Promenade
4. Il vecchio castello
5. Promenade
6. Tuileries
7. Bydlo
8. Promenade
9. Ballet of Chicks in Their Shells
10. Samuel Goldenburg and Schmuyle
11. The Marketplace at Limoges
12. Catacombae, sepulchrum romanum
13. Con mortuis in lingua mortua
14. The Hut on Fowl's Legs
15. The Great Gate at Kiev
16. Marche miniature
17. Polovtsian March
18. Overture

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14259 in Music
• Released on: 2004-09-14
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: Hybrid SACD

Customer Reviews

More Spectacular than EVER!!
I am a H U G E fan of the RCA Living Stereo Series. I have all the CD's (I wish I had the LP's) of the series, beginning with the 1993 discs through the releases remastered with the 20 bit UV22 Super CD encoding and the Weiss 24/96 technologies. I also have the JVC XRCD's that have been released featuring RCA Living Stereo recordings. I mention this merely to establish credibility.

The clarity on this Reiner "Pictures at an Exhibition" is staggering (and I am just talking about the CD layer of this hybrid for now! I'll get into the SACD layer a bit later.) I did A/B comparisons with the JVC XRCD2 and the CD layer of this recording and was surprised at what I did not hear on the JVC, which costs a cool $30 per disc. The JVC XRCD2 is more veiled and does not give you the spaciousness that the CD Layer gives you. As a weird example of the new clarity afforded by this new remastering, on Track 7 - Bydlo, the tenor tuba player playing the theme takes breaths between each phrase; sometimes it's a long breath, at other times it's a short gasp. On the JVC XRCD, you can barely hear it.

The bass drum used liberally throughout the recording is revealed like it has never been on any of the aforementioned recordings. This drum has real weight and impact; its reverberations in the hall are evident and the drum head itself has tone, texture and flex. I was truly shocked that this much sound information had been missing from this recording on CD until now. It's no wonder the LP version is so highly sought after and prized.

Throughout the entire disc, reasons to purchase this Hybrid SACD emerge: the wondrous sheen of the strings, the fantastic accuracy of the woodwind tones, the brashness of the brass instruments, the indescribable majesty of the final "The Great Gate at Kiev", etc. I can't list them all here but I can assure you that there is no other digital recording of Reiner's "Pictures at an Exhibition" that more completely reveals his genius, the beauty of this work, the virtuosity of the players of the 1957 Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the exquisite acoustics of the Hall in which they played.

With regard to the SACD layer, I don't know how a recording can sound more real in the digital domain, unless you were there in the Hall and, of course, at that point it's all analog. Some key SACD points: Wide and deep, accurately rendered soundstage. Stable, pinpoint placement of the players of the orchestra. Excellent timbre and dynamics. Without a hint of the digital etch that plagues CD's. This recording is truly brought to life using DSD. SACD is as close to reality as you're going to get using a 5 inch piece of plastic and this recording proves it!

The engineers at Soundmirror, the Boston studio that remastered this SACD from the original master tape to DSD, have done a SUPERB job with Reiner's "Pictures at an Exhibition." This new RCA Living Stereo Hybrid SACD is superior in every way to the crme-de-la-crme JVC XRCD2 which, except for the analog version on LP, was the be all and end all for the digital rendition of this recording.

FYI: My playback equipment is a Rega Planet 2000 CD Player used as a transport connected via a PS Audio Digital Xtreme 75 Ohm Interconnect to a Musical Fidelity A3 24 192KHz Upsampling DAC. From there, Kimber Heroes as interconnects to a Musical Fidelity A3.2 Integrated Amplifier out to B&W CDM1-NT speakers via Kimber 8TC biwired. Velodyne subwoofer. The SACD player's a secret!

Just how hard can it be?
Just how hard can it be, in this age of digi-techno miracle machinery, to make a recording of a major symphony orchestra that sounds natural? They could do it at RCA Living Stereo (and Mercury Living Presence) in the 1950's with only two or three microphones and analog tube equipment. Today, with all the gizmos, most orchestral recordings are over-processed, over-equalized, over-mixed and blended, pasturized and homogenized into grating sterility.

This recording is wonderful. The performance is magic. The SACD layer is even more natural sounding than the CD layer. Keep your 5.1 multi-channel surround sound, I'm hooked on Living Stereo.

Beautiful mastering of a masterful recording
This is quite simply a beautful mastering of what was always a masterful recording. One of the best, of the ones I have heard so far, of the new SACD incarnations of the Living Stereo collection.
This is perhaps my favourite recording of Pictures at an Exhibition - each of the pieces is perfectly characterized with stunning technique from the Chicago Symphony and Reiner. The recording brings this out brilliantly - THIS is the way this recording should be heard. If you have a multichannel system, you will get an extra treat - this recording was originally made with three channels to get a better centre image and this has been preserved in this issue (as is the case with all the LS SACD releases that were done this way). If your three speakers have sufficient distance between each other, you will hear a detailed sound stage the likes of which is rare, and truly belies the recording's age.
All the other pieces on the disc are brilliantly handled as well. Tchaikovsky's Marche Slav is notable for the warmth and unashamed romanticism the CSO and Reiner bring to it.

Highly recommended.