Nojima plays Liszt ... Reference Recordings

"Demands recommendation alongside history’s best recorded performances." – Stereophile
Connoisseurs of great piano playing will love this classic reissue. A reclusive cult figure who records even less often than he plays in public, Nojima is Japan’s most celebrated concert pianist and a Cliburn Competition Silver Medal winner. Long out of print—brought back by popular demand! Newly remastered from the original analog tapes in HDCD. A contemporary pianist that evokes the wonders of the golden age of pianists typified by Horowitz, Godowsky, Lhevinne, and the other giants of that period. Nojima performs with Japan’s major orchestras, including frequent appearances with the New Japan Philharmonic, Tokyo Symphony, Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra, Yomiuri Nippon Symphony, Kyushu Symphony, and Gunma Symphony in domestic subscription performances and as a soloist on overseas tours, as well as collaborating with orchestras and conductors such as the Montreal Symphony and Charles Dutoit. His 1988 recording Minoru Nojima Plays Liszt quickly became a reference! work, named Best Recording of the Month by Stereo Review, which described it as "a stunning demonstration of technique put at the service of profoundly musical ends".

This is an extraordinary recording. Nojima may well be the finest pianist most people have never heard of. Minoru Nojima was a child prodigy in Japan, won a major nationwide competition there as a teenager, studied with Lev Oborin in Moscow and then with Constance Keene and Abram Chasins in New York, and burst upon the international music scene as a winner of the Van Cliburn piano competition in 1969. Although known and highly respected amongst pianists as a "pianist's pianist," he is not well known to most music lovers, largely because he doesn't like to make recordings and has made extremely few. This technically superb, rich-sounding digital recording was made in 1986 by Keith Johnson in the Civic Auditorium of Oxnard, California, for the San-Francisco-based audiophile label Reference Recordings; Nojima plays a tonally beautiful Hamburg Steinway concert grand.
Franz Liszt was of course the leading piano virtuoso of his day, and he wrote these pieces for his own concerts. Hence they bristle with formidable technical difficulties and challenges. These are surmounted by Nojima without breaking a sweat; he almost makes them sound easy. His playing here is a revelation. He is a consummate virtuoso, and his huge, effortless technique is often mind-boggling, but is always at the service of a profound grasp of and genuinely idiomatic feeling for the Liszt piece he is performing. Indeed, his Liszt playing--with a real command of legato, of cantabile singing tone, and with dazzling pyrotechnics nicely integrated with poetry, sensitivity, a feeling for the phrase, the long line, the architecture of the piece--is in the grand tradition of Arrau and Bolet, the two greatest Liszt pianists of recent decades. This recording should be heard and treasured by anyone who loves Liszt's piano music, and/or by anyone who admires breathtaking pianism.

(Note for audiophiles: I compared this CD to Jorge Bolet's series of digital recordings of Liszt piano works on Decca/London. Of the major classical labels, Decca/London has long been my favorite for sound quality. But in this comparison, the Decca/London recordings are not even close in engineering quality. Which prompts this reasonable audiophile question: if Keith Johnson, working for the small audiophile label Reference Recordings, can capture the immediacy, brilliance, depth, and richness of piano tone that we hear here, why can't the major classical labels, with all their resources, engineer recordings of comparable excellence?)

The success of this CD led to a second Reference Recordings CD of Nojima playing Ravel. It too is exceptionally fine, also enjoys state-of-the-art piano sound, and can be confidently recommended to anyone who enjoys this recording.

carrey escribió:El primero de la lista hace años que lo tengo, pero en vinilo.
Llevo tiempo sin escucharlo lo tendré que volver a escuchar ya que me has despertado el interés. Los Reference Recording son buenas grabaciones pero ahora mismo no tengo constancia de tenerlo como uno de mis mejores discos.

Alex escribió:Mira que tenía ambos CDs en mi colección de música de piano, pero no ha sido hasta ayer cuando he descubierto estas joyas de la ingeniería de sonido.

Me estoy refiriendo a dos discos de Minoru Nojima:

- Nojima plays Liszt



- Nojima plays Ravel



El primero empezó a sonar y sonaba tan bien, que me levanté del sillón asombrado. Lo escuché entero. Luego puse el otro, y lo mismo... el piano se oye increíblemente bien, perfecto, natural, asombroso para ser una grabación, especialmente de un instrumento tan difícil de llevar a soporte físico.

Para mí es una grabación que debería ser escuchada por todos los amantes de la música de piano de Liszt, o por cualquiera a quien le guste el piano llevado a niveles asombrosos.

Luego investigué por la web, y me di cuenta de que no estaba loco, sino que se trata de dos obras maestras de la ingeniería de sonido.

"Demands recommendation alongside history’s best recorded performances." – Stereophile
Connoisseurs of great piano playing will love this classic reissue. A reclusive cult figure who records even less often than he plays in public, Nojima is Japan’s most celebrated concert pianist and a Cliburn Competition Silver Medal winner. Long out of print—brought back by popular demand! Newly remastered from the original analog tapes in HDCD. A contemporary pianist that evokes the wonders of the golden age of pianists typified by Horowitz, Godowsky, Lhevinne, and the other giants of that period. Nojima performs with Japan’s major orchestras, including frequent appearances with the New Japan Philharmonic, Tokyo Symphony, Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra, Yomiuri Nippon Symphony, Kyushu Symphony, and Gunma Symphony in domestic subscription performances and as a soloist on overseas tours, as well as collaborating with orchestras and conductors such as the Montreal Symphony and Charles Dutoit. His 1988 recording Minoru Nojima Plays Liszt quickly became a reference! work, named Best Recording of the Month by Stereo Review, which described it as "a stunning demonstration of technique put at the service of profoundly musical ends".

This is an extraordinary recording. Nojima may well be the finest pianist most people have never heard of. Minoru Nojima was a child prodigy in Japan, won a major nationwide competition there as a teenager, studied with Lev Oborin in Moscow and then with Constance Keene and Abram Chasins in New York, and burst upon the international music scene as a winner of the Van Cliburn piano competition in 1969. Although known and highly respected amongst pianists as a "pianist's pianist," he is not well known to most music lovers, largely because he doesn't like to make recordings and has made extremely few. This technically superb, rich-sounding digital recording was made in 1986 by Keith Johnson in the Civic Auditorium of Oxnard, California, for the San-Francisco-based audiophile label Reference Recordings; Nojima plays a tonally beautiful Hamburg Steinway concert grand.
Franz Liszt was of course the leading piano virtuoso of his day, and he wrote these pieces for his own concerts. Hence they bristle with formidable technical difficulties and challenges. These are surmounted by Nojima without breaking a sweat; he almost makes them sound easy. His playing here is a revelation. He is a consummate virtuoso, and his huge, effortless technique is often mind-boggling, but is always at the service of a profound grasp of and genuinely idiomatic feeling for the Liszt piece he is performing. Indeed, his Liszt playing--with a real command of legato, of cantabile singing tone, and with dazzling pyrotechnics nicely integrated with poetry, sensitivity, a feeling for the phrase, the long line, the architecture of the piece--is in the grand tradition of Arrau and Bolet, the two greatest Liszt pianists of recent decades. This recording should be heard and treasured by anyone who loves Liszt's piano music, and/or by anyone who admires breathtaking pianism.

(Note for audiophiles: I compared this CD to Jorge Bolet's series of digital recordings of Liszt piano works on Decca/London. Of the major classical labels, Decca/London has long been my favorite for sound quality. But in this comparison, the Decca/London recordings are not even close in engineering quality. Which prompts this reasonable audiophile question: if Keith Johnson, working for the small audiophile label Reference Recordings, can capture the immediacy, brilliance, depth, and richness of piano tone that we hear here, why can't the major classical labels, with all their resources, engineer recordings of comparable excellence?)

The success of this CD led to a second Reference Recordings CD of Nojima playing Ravel. It too is exceptionally fine, also enjoys state-of-the-art piano sound, and can be confidently recommended to anyone who enjoys this recording.