Sergei Rachmaninoff grew up in a musical, middle-class family in Northwest Russia. His gifts as a pianist were recognized early, but he considered himself a composer first, and a pianist second. He was one of the finest pianists of his day and, as a composer, perhaps the last great representative of Romanticism in classical music. The piano features prominently in Rachmaninoff's compositional output. He made it a point to use his own skills as a performer to explore fully the expressive possibilities of the instrument. Even in his earliest works, he revealed a sure grasp of idiomatic piano writing and a striking gift for melody.

Zenph President Dr. John Q. Walker has a personal connection to Rachmaninoff in that his piano teacher, Ruth Slenczynska, was one of only two students Rachmaninoff ever took on in the U.S. In a sense, Zenph owes its existence to Rachmaninoff. Dr. Walker explains, "Taking lessons from Ms. Slenczynska, I understood right away the long journey it would take to ever achieve the impossible goal of playing like Rachmaninoff, so I wanted a short cut. I wanted to hear Rachmaninoff play live in the room with me even though he had long since passed away. That germ of an idea, became my passion for creating Zenph."

Read reviewer Tom Gibb's take on the Zenph Rachmaninoff project.

From the Liner Notes of the Zenph/Sony Classics Release:

Having completed our scientific analysis of these thirteen original Rachmaninoff performances, the 29,900 notes and associated pedal motions are now ready for a musical analysis. For the first time it is possible to look at the best of “raw” Rachmaninoff, not altered by anyone (as was the case with his piano roll recordings, where he and Edgar Fairchild of Ampico would remove all the “wrong holes”). Although they reflect only a small part of Rachmaninoff’s 150 recordings for Edison and Victor, these tracks provide an excellent overview of his musical and pianistic breadth. More importantly, listening to these re-performances of the originals in modern sound will, perhaps, remind today’s pianists of a musical aesthetic that has seemingly been forgotten –especially Rachmaninoff’s aesthetic, as it applies to his own works.

Too often we hear performances of Rachmaninoff’s concert stage “war horses” – be they Études-tableaux, the Préludes, or the Moments musicaux – played with a heavy use of pedal, unbearable rubato and other Romantic excesses (in the worst sense of the word). Listening to these recordings, it does not take long to realize that Rachmaninoff’s performances display none of these characteristics.

His pedaling is sparse rather than heavy and his texture remarkably transparent (something that can sometimes be hard to hear through the noise artifacts of the original recordings). The timing of the melodic phrasing and harmonic rhythm reveals structured concepts devoid of cheap effects and meandering sentimentalism.

And there is never any bashing.

Comparing the loudness numbers in these re-performance files with performances of some of the same works made on the same piano by modern-day pianists shows the difference clearly: today’s performances are generally “heavier.” As an added challenge to our efforts, we had to consider the difference between the original piano and the acoustics of his recording studios. In each case, a balance was struck between maintaining a natural touch and attaining the dynamics that we hear on the old originals, since, given a large piano and a live room, little force is needed to produce a loud tone.

The thirteen binaural tracks – the second half of this recording – are tailored for a headphone listening experience, as if heard from the perspective of the pianist. Binaural recordings are made with two small omnidirectional microphones placed in the entrance to the ear canals of an artificial head. We positioned the dummy head at the piano bench, so that a headphone listener would be able to get inside Rachmaninoff's head, to hear what he might have heard as he sat at the piano.

Overall, our goal has been one of extracting this master’s inimitable musicianship from the confines of his dated original recordings, and thus, whether through new recordings or live re-performances, to let more audiences become intimately familiar with the sound produced by those unique fingers.

- Drs. Anatoly Larkin and John Q. Walker, Zenph Studios