New Raff CD due in February 2022: complete works for cello and piano

[Mark Thomas]

Mine too, ordered with fingers crossed hoping for not too much intrusive sniffing/breathing.

[Alan Howe]

The sniffing/breathing comes and goes. It could be worse, but it could also have been avoided. Nevertheless the playing is spectacularly good - so much so that I'm convinced this seriously outclasses the Toccata disc.

But the players must be told not to do this. What might be acceptable live is a serious distraction in a recording.

[Justin]

For those who support this, they say it adds a sense of "authenticity" to the recording, and provides a human element to it. Otherwise you are simply listening to music with no connection to the real world. Hard to defend I think, especially with the works of Raff which are as worldly as they can be.

[Alan Howe]

It doesn't add authenticity at all, of course. Just annoyance. And a recording is different from a live performance because it's designed for repeated listening.

[Mark Thomas]

My copy arrived today. Full marks to Croisé, who plays beautifully, matched by Shevchenko's equally dextrous and intelligent accompaniment. They're blessed with a recording which has both warmth and depth, and doesn't favour the cello unrealistically. It's difficult to imagine that this music could be presented more favourably but unfortunately Croisé's breathing is indeed audible throughout and sometimes really quite distracting, which does detract from the recording, at least for me. That said, despite my loyalty to the original Toccata CD from Joseph Mendoes & Taeyeon Lim which first made this repertoire available, I must admit that this new CD quite eclipses it.

[TerraEpon]

Finally listened to this and honestly the breathing is only really distracting in a couple spots, most of the time it's fine.

[John Boyer]

Having now heard it a few times, I agree that the breathing isn't too bad. Enough to be irritating, but not so bad as to be unlistenable, which is how I find the CPO disk of the Kahn cello sonatas. 

[semloh]

I think it's clear that 'extraneous' human noises during recorded performances affect listeners in different ways. For me, the musicianship makes the connection with the player. Sometimes I just think "There's a person actualy playing that instrument and making that beautiful music - amazing!" This is a marvellous disc, but would (in my view) be better without such noises.