Martzy proves to be an exemplary and virtuosic interpretor of Schubert in these beautiful recordings, providing a rare level of balance and poise in the delivery as she works her way through the canvas. The performance can be truly appreciated in its rawest and most exposed form captured directly from the original master tapes at the ERC studio.
The EMI tapes for these recordings sounded exemplary and were in good condition . However many lacquers were wasted during the initial cutting process as nearly all of the original joining tape used at the edit points had perished and kept coming apart every 20 seconds or so. The decision was made to stop cutting and replace the adhesive tape at every single edit point throughout all six master tapes. This was a painstaking exercise that our engineers undertook with great care over a two week period.
The ERC philosophy is to treat every title with the same level of fanatical detail and conviction as the very first – it is for that reason we revisited the entire production process treating everything as if it were the first time, asking new questions of ourselves and exploring new directions to gain improvements on what we had achieved before with the Bach.
The jacket production process was approached from a fresh perspective. All printing plates were re-done from scratch and reworked with literally months of testing and proofing of the individual components to achieve the desired letterpress depth of finish. Particular time and attention was paid to the accurate reproduction of the rope / tassel image used on the original jacket.
Examples of this process can be observed in the images below:
Letter pressed board sample
Columbia rope technique comparison
Columbia rope plate.
Columbia rope plate.
Columbia rope plate.
Columbia rope and EMI logo plates.
Letter pressed board sample (front detail)
Letter pressed board sample (EMI logo detail)
