I had a marathon tape playing session this weekend, playing all five of Ed's new tapes featuring Alena Baeva, violin and Vadym Kholodenko, piano. The tapes combined both parts of a live concert that Alena and Vadym performed at Ed's home studio/concert hall and recordings that Ed did of them without audience.
As usual, the acoustics are magnificent. Ed has been able to consistently capture the sound of of the instruments playing in a real acoustical space, both with really fine electronics (engineered by Tony Ma) and a very direct connection to his Studer tape machine, no multitracking or mixing.
So my comments will focus on the artists. Both Alena and Vadym are in their early 30's (she from Kazakhkstan and he from Ukraine). Both have won first prizes at four international competitions each, including the Wienawski competition for Alena and the Van Cliburn competition for Vadym. The recital was composed of violin-piano (or in some cases piano-violin) sonatas and other pieces from Mozart to Schubert, that is late classical to early romantic. Here the issue is musicality over virtuosity. You can tell that Alena and Vadym have played together before with the subtle interplay between them - sometimes the piano imitating the violin and sometimes the reverse. Virtuosity is clearly evident hearing Alena playing the Milstein Paganiniana, a tour de force of violin playing, with Milstein's arrangement of Paganini even more difficult than the original Paganini. Vadym has a similar level of performance in four Rachmaninoff preludes including the famous g minor. You will also get to hear the Purcell Ground, a delightful short keyboard piece that Vadym plays. Ed recorded it twice, once in the concert and once without audience. They are on two different tapes.
If you were to buy only one to start, I would suggest the Mozart tape which also includes the Milstein Paganiniana and the studio version of the Purcell Ground, so you get to hear the two artists together and each playing a solo.
You can decide for yourself, since Ed has posted on Youtube (accessible from his website) the concert featuring the main pieces on the tapes.
https://ultraanaloguerecordings.com/new/i-am-very-excited-to-release-these-5-new-tapes/
Larry
