****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
This is, without doubt, one of the finest piano recordings ever made. It deserves a special award for Paul Jacobs' magnificent playing on a fabulous Bosendorfer Imperial grand piano and for the excellence of the warm, spacious, brilliant recorded sound. As they say, this release exhausts superlatives. Jacobs' performances are justly esteemed for their insights into this color-drenched, sybaritic music; he judges each timbre and each accent magically, putting his playing beyond almost all of the others (Gieserking, Zimmerman, et al.). Just listen to "Footprints in the Snow," "On the terrace of Moonlight," "La puerto del vino," "The Fairies Dance Exquisitely," and "Fireworks," etc., etc. for an example of transcendental pianism. Exquisite, indeed. Lovely! And virtuosic, as in the last Prelude of Book 2, "Fireworks." If you don't own this release, you'd better snap up your copy before you're reduced to having to burn a scatchy library copy.
