Polonaises [Classical, SACD, Hybrid SACD]

Yes, as other reviewers have said elsewhere, you really need a multi-channel setup to get the most from this SACD.

I used to have this album in its DG Originals incarnation (still available of course), and at the time felt the recording rather clattery - to such an extent that it rendered the interpretations a blank in retrospect.

Here I did an experiment - I listened to the famous Polonaise op.44 first in CD stereo, which sounded better than I recall it did on the Originals CD, with more body and little harshness in the upper register. The stereo SACD layer was a little better, but nothing revelatory - but in multi-channel: I can only say 'WOW!', simple as that. The sound opens up dramatically with the hall's ambience (the Musikverein in Vienna) brought into play to wonderful effect. The improvement is pretty staggering - nearly in the same class as Yundi Li's DG Chopin CD, which of course was recorded last year, not in 1975 like Pollini's disc. The use of the rear channels here is very clever - DG's engineers have captured the full acoustic qualities of this great hall extremely well.

Performance-wise these recordings are excellent. I've never been a devout Pollini-phile, although some of his recordings are my favourites for certain works, like Schubert's D959 Sonata and Brahms' 2nd Piano Concerto (the earlier recording made about the same time as this SACD). Here he is in imperious form, before the element of coolness afflicted his playing in the 1980s - although I have a couple of his most recent CDs, e.g. of the Chopin Ballades where hs also plays in a freer and almost fiery style, as here.

Most enjoyable perhaps is his large-scale view of the great Polonaise-Fantaisie which comes over superbly here. I know this work very well, and while Richter's Praga recording is probably my favourite, this is also outstanding.

If you've got a multi-channel setup, do not hesitate - otherwise you can stick with the redbook CD in my view. 4.5/5

This is the sort of SACD enregistrement you should hear to know the capabilities of this format. It suites trully great on the piano, and this is probably one of the best sacd's by Deutsche Grammophon. It's up to you to find another one who can be seen as a great one. Trully inspiring and poetic.

Besides being an amateur pianist and music critic, I am also a video game buff, and I recently bought a Playstation 3. Besides everything else it had to offer, it is also able to play SACDs, so I thought I would give it a crack. I haven't been able to upgrade my visual or audio equipment; all I have are my Altec Lansing PC speakers, which are good for what they are but have no optical input.

Maurizio Pollini is one of the pianists who has suffered the most from the ever-tinny DG sound. It was not so bad in the LP era, but DG's yellow-label transfers to CD have been consistently appalling, and for a long time their DDD-DDD transfers were barely any better. If you were born after 1980 and wanted to hear this Italian virtuoso strut his stuff, you had to either catch one of his rare live performances or endure some of the worst transfers ever slapped on a disc. The only one I could ever tolerate was the Chopin Etudes (which still blows me away), and most of the others were so metallic and cramped-feeling that I couldn't stand to listen to them all the way through.

The SACD transfer still doesn't sound ideal with my equipment, but the difference is significant. New dynamic contrasts appear; clarity improves greatly; there is a big clean-up in the formerly explosive noise from certain loud attacks; key releases and silences are much crisper and more distinct. There is still definitely an edge to Pollini's readings, but it is reduced to the point that it seems like a natural side-effect to Pollini's concentration and temperamental ferocity rather than the result of musical insensitivity.

If I had only heard the standard CD release, I would not have gotten as much out of these performances, simple as that.