RACHMANINOFF: Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor; LISZT: Piano Concerto No. 1 in E-flat – Arthur Rubinstein, piano/Chicago Symphony Orchestra/Fritz Reiner (Rach.); RCA Victor Symphony/Alfred Wallenstein (Liszt) – JVC xrcd

The warhorses continue, but if heaven forbid neither of these classics
is in your collection as yet you couldn’t do better than pick up on
this one – especially if your 44.1 CD playback system is of high enough
quality to appreciate the greatly improved sonics of this remastering
effort from JVC. Plus you are getting an unusually lengthy program for
an xrcd – nearly an hour. Both original recordings date from l956.
Rubinstein isn’t afraid of extracting the maximum schmaltz out of the
super-Romantic concerto. And that triangle in the Liszt never sounded
so clearly (or seemingly so annoyingly…)

– John Sunier