Andre Watts - Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 2「1967, Haas Hi-Res Stereo」

Andre Watts, piano
Leonard Bernstein, conductor
New York Philharmonic
Aired on April 19, 1967
I do not monetize off of my videos and share them in the context of Fair Use of the Copyright Law of the United States of America. All ads if any are from obscure copyright claimers.
#AndreWatts #LeonardBernstein #NYPhil #Brahms

[@waynepiano]

Mark your calendars! On June 5th at 8 pm in Schoenberg Hall, the UCLA Symphony will be performing Brahms’ 2nd piano concerto with Davide Di Rienzo as soloist and Samuel Chung as conductor. The performance will be followed by a Sibelius’ 1st symphony with Gan Xiong conducting. I went back to a project I did last year of André Watts’ 1967 first movement rendition with Leonard Bernstein and the NY Phil. I felt the audio I had at the time was a bit too much and too artificial. Luckily thanks to ChatGPT, I am adopting my remastering workflow now based on a psychoacoustic phenomenon called the Haas effect. The Haas effect states that when one sound is followed by another with a delay of approximately 40 ms or less (below humans’ echo threshold), the two are perceived as a single sound. In the audio mixing sense, this provides a great opportunity to turn mono audio into stereo without any editing in the conversion process. The result has been the most natural sounding of mono-turned stereo recordings that I’ve heard. It was commonly known that we needed to apply some form of reverb to expand the soundscape, which is not needed in this case. The touch of reverb I added, in this project, was only because the original audio was dry and not representative of that Bernstein NY Phil sound from the official recordings. My reverb is also a new approach that it no longer makes a recording sound distant. Hope you all enjoy this performance of André Watts and Bernstein’s NY Phil, and we look forward to seeing you in-person or online via live-stream on June 5th!