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Nathaniel Rosen, cellist, with Doris Stevenson, pianist, and special guests Arturo Delmoni, violinist, and Kaaren Erickson, soprano US $15.00

DTS 20-bit Discrete Surround CD US $25.00

To listen to a sample track on this CD, go to "What's On It" below. You will need to have the RealAudio plug-in installed on your computer and a 28.8 or better modem . Go to our Technical Information page for more details on how to do this or if you are having any problems with playing any of the tracks. Short pieces and encores for cello and piano, with an emphasis on quiet works for reflective listening. The last three tracks in particular are art music of the purest kind. Stunning sound. REPERTORY: Track 1: Jean Antoine Piani Desplanes: Intrada Track 2: Erik Satie: Gymnopedie No. 1 Track 3: Gabriel Faure: Elegy Op. 24 Track 4: Felix Mendelssohn: Songs Without Words, Op. 62 No. 1: A May Breeze Track 5: Maurice Ravel: La Vallee de Cloches Track 6: Edward Elgar: Sospiri, Op. 70 Track 7: Claude Debussy: Romance Track 8: Fritz Kreisler: Allegretto in the Style of Luigi Boccherini Track 9: Alfredo Casella: Notturno Track 10: Frederic Chopin: Largo from Sonata, Op. 65 Track 11: Ludwig van Beethoven: Andante arranged by Fritz Kreisler with Arturo Delmoni, violinist Track 12: Robert Schumann: Langsam from Pieces in Folk Style, Op. 102 Track 13: Georges Bizet: Intermezzo (Agnus Dei) from "L’Arlesienne" Suite II, No. 2 arranged by Fritz Kreisler, with Arturo Delmoni, violinist Track 14: Sergei Rachmaninoff: Lied Track 15: Edouard Lalo: "Chants Russes" from Concerto, Op 29 Track 16: Johannes Brahms: O Tod, wie bitter bist du (O Death, how bitter art thou) from Op. 121 Track 17: J.S. Bach: Jesus Christ, I Implore Thee Track 18: Richard Strauss: Morgen, Op. 27, No. 4 with Kaaren Erickson, soprano [At Hi-Fi ‘97] John [Marks] continued with a Richard Strauss song, "Morgen," from his Reverie CD, with cellist Nathaniel Rosen and sung by an unfamiliar soprano, Kaaren Erickson. I was moved by the deeply profound cello interpretation and by the quality of singing in this work; it was significant enough to liken to Elizabeth Schwartzkopf. Arthur LeGrand Shapiro, rec.audio.high-end newsgroup As I approach 50, I find that pure beauty of sound alone no longer does it for me when it comes to the music I turn to in the solitude of my listening room. String quartets, solo piano pieces, and cerebral pieces like Bach’s Art of the Fugue increasingly find their way on to the Levinson No.31 or the Sondek LP12. It is some surprise, therefore, that the first one of my 1997 picks qualifies on terms of sonic beauty. This 1996 collection of transcriptions from the classical repertoire features that most vocal of instruments, the cello, lovingly caressed by "Nick" Rosen (even if he does take the first Satie Gymnopedie a little too athletically for my taste), occasionally joined by violin and soprano. The booklet notes state that Reverie was recorded with a Schoeps "Sphere" stereo microphone and a Nagra-D by that canny master, Jerry Bruck. However, in Jonathan Scull’s interview with Rosen, Marks, and Bruck in the January ‘97 Stereophile, it was stated that four microphones were used to capture the soundfield. Whatever, the sound of Rosen’s 1738 Domenico Montagnana instrument is robust yet not too forward, vibrant yet not over-aggressive, and set within the luminous acoustic of the large Recital Hall of the Performing Arts Center at Purchase College, SUNY. The piano is positioned farther back within the soundstage, yet is not too reverberant-sounding and has its full measure of body. There is always the danger with this repertoire that it could be confused with salon music. That is definitely not the case here. In that January interview, Rosen quoted his teacher Gregor Piatigorsky as saying, "I have made a vow that I will never play one uninspired note in a recording studio." I can vouch that there are no uninspired notes on this disc! John Atkinson, Editor, Stereophile "Records to Die For 1997" Award, Stereophile magazine Something new under the sun that is both genuinely new and genuinely good is quite rare, but it does happen. I submit that one such development is AES Fellow Jerry Bruck’s (Posthorn Recordings, New York City) novel and elegant surround-sound microphone technique, Bruck KFM 360. Bruck KFM 360 recording and playback is not two-channel stereo with ambiance channels tacked on. It is true stereophony [from the Greek words for "solid" and "sound"], which uniformly recreates the entire soundfield that surrounds an ideal listening position in the performance space. Bruck KFM 360 recordings reproduce hall ambiance more faithfully than two-channel stereo recordings are capable of doing in exactly the same way, and for exactly the same reasons, that stereo recordings reproduce the soundstage more faithfully than mono is capable of doing. Just as conventional stereo uses two microphone signals to separate and reproduce right and left soundfields, Bruck KFM 360 uses four microphone-derived signals to separate and reproduce front and rear soundfields, as well as left and right. In exactly the same way that the coherent reproduction of right and left soundfields in stereo allows for the psychoacoustic illusion of stage depth, with Bruck KFM 360 the coherent reproduction of all four soundfields allows for an unprecedentedly natural psychoacoustic illusion of immersion in the recording venue’s acoustic. Bruck KFM 360 utilizes two forward-facing figure-of-eight microphones on either side of a modified Schoeps KFM 6 sphere microphone. Bruck KFM 360 results in four "virtual" microphones recording a valid set of quadraphonic signals: sphere plus 8s provide the front pair, and sphere plus polarity-inverted 8s provide the rear. This is because the sphere microphone’s electrical output has no out-of-phase component, while the figure-of-eight microphones have a non-inverting lobe at the front and a polarity-inverted lobe at the rear. As in conventional stereo M-S (mid-side) microphone technique, but turned to the side, combining the sphere and figure-of-eight microphone signals on the same side in phase cancels the rear information, leaving only front information. Combining the signal from the sphere with the figure-of-eight microphone out of phase cancels the front information, leaving only the rear information. Although it would be possible to derive front center-channel information from the Bruck KFM 360 microphone array, Bruck believes that a system of four symmetrical playback channels is sufficient for concert and acoustic music reproduction. The AES presented Bruck’s technical paper describing the Bruck KFM 360 concept at its 103rd Convention (New York, September 26-29, 1997) following a public demonstration at a meeting of AES’ New York Section. Bruck had presented an earlier paper at the biennial Tonmeistertagung in Germany, which was subsequently published in its volume of proceedings. Although Bruck has been advised that his invention is patentable, he has dedicated his invention to the public domain. Bruck hopes that the royalty-free dissemination of his microphone technique will be a spur to realistic surround-sound recordings of classical music. Bruck has designed a trademark for his technique, which he will license at no charge to any engineer or record company using it. Schalltechnik Dr.-Ing. Schoeps GmbH of Karlsruhe, Germany, will offer a readymade Bruck KFM 360 microphone array (Model KFM 360) as an off-the-shelf item, which will be introduced at the next AES Convention, to be held at San Francisco, California, September 26-29, 1998. But how does it sound? I produced the first commercial project recorded with the Bruck KFM 360 microphone array. That recording is International Tchaikovsky Competition Gold Medal-winning cellist Nathaniel Rosen’s recital Reverie. The two-channel stereo release, made from the KFM 6 Sphere channels only (John Marks Records CD JMR 10), was recognized by Stereophile magazine as a "Record to Die For." At a press reception at Hi-Fi ‘97 in San Francisco, California, I demonstrated Bruck KFM 360 playback from a Reverie master tape clone using a Nagra D four-channel digital tape deck, and four identical equidistant channels consisting of Clayton Audio amplifiers and Waveform loudspeakers. John Marks Records has recently entered into an agreement under which laserdisk and DVD distributor Image Entertainment, of Chatsworth, California, will release (in September, 1998) the Bruck KFM 360 version of Reverie on digital audio compact discs encoded in the DTS 20-bit digital surround sound format. The enhancement Bruck KFM 360 playback provides over the ordinary stereo CD release of Reverie is subtle but worthwhile. The perception of the enveloping hall ambiance is not confined to a "sweet spot." Surprisingly, when the playback system is properly set up and adjusted, the difference that is noticeable when the rear channels are suddenly muted is, as the soundfield collapses to the front, the timbral balance appears to change. This demonstrates that Bruck KFM 360 does reproduce—in the home—the effect the hall acoustic has upon the sounds originating from the performance space’s stage.

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