Symphonic Dances, Rachmaninov lossless m4a

Rachmaninov Symphonic Dances

Vladimir Ashkenazy and The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra

I personally love these peices and thought I would share with you all. I noticed that there has previously been a share of this disc, but the links are dead. So here they are again from my own cd

I recently heard Marin Alsop at the BBC proms perform this work and found hear reading of the dances interesting, however I feel Ashkenazy really finds the drama and the lush romantic sweep from this world class Orchestra.

The Symphonic Dances, Op. 45, is an orchestral suite in three movements. Completed in 1940, it is Sergei Rachmaninoff’s last composition. The work summarizes Rachmaninoff’s compositional output.

The work is fully representative of the composer’s later style with its curious, shifting harmonies, the almost Prokofiev-like grotesquerie of the outer movements and the focus on individual instrumental tone colors throughout (highlighted by his use of an alto saxophone in the opening dance).[1] The opening three-note motif, introduced quietly but soon reinforced by heavily staccato chords and responsible for much of the movement’s rhythmic vitality, is reminiscent of the Queen of Shemakha’s theme in Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Golden Cockerel,[2] the only music by another composer that he had taken out of Russia with him in 1917.

The Dances allowed him to indulge in a nostalgia for the Russia he had known, much as he had done in the Third Symphony,[3] as well as to effectively sum up his lifelong fascination with ecclesiastical chants. In the first dance, he quotes the opening theme of his First Symphony, itself derived from motifs characteristic of Russian church music. In the finale he quotes both the Dies Irae and the chant "Blessed be the Lord" (Blagosloven yesi, Gospodi) from his All-Night Vigil.[1]

1.Non allegro (C minor – C major)
2.Andante con moto (Tempo di valse) (G minor)
3.Lento assai – Allegro vivace – Lento assai. Come prima – Allegro vivace. (D minor – D major)

Enjoy and don’t forget to say Thanks!

https://mega.nz/#F!xgRzBA5C!SAyWlUY2dp7SSakRuhrIhw

thank many!

Thank you for sharing this!

Thank you dmoth for posting this wonderful orchestral music from the great Sergei Rachmaninov.

Thanks a lot!

Thank you very much

thanks

Thank you very much!!

Thanks for the share.

As a reminder :

"M4A is a file extension for an audio file encoded with advanced audio coding (AAC) which is a lossy compression. M4A was generally intended as the successor to MP3, which had not been originally designed for audio only but was layer III in an MPEG 1 or 2 video files. M4A stands for MPEG 4 Audio."

So how it has been encoded? please clarify I have doubt about lossless 😉

Thanks.

Not really. M4A is a container format, not an audio codec. It can contain (lossy) AAC data (as you say) or it can equally well contain (lossless) ALAC data. I suppose that the OP is using ALAC encoding rather than AAC – and why should we disbelieve that?

In any case, M4A files containing lossless data are easily converted from ALAC to FLAC with no change in the lossless status. You will end up with files roughly the same size.

Yes but the mostly time it’s AAC so lossy so how could be sure it is lossless?

By default when I saw M4A I put it directly in my lossy folder.

Hello fellow forum members. I ripped the disc using the only method I am familiar with, into my iTunes application. I always select the lossless option in preferences and therefore the file is lossless in an m4a container as far as I am aware. It certainly retains the audio on playback and after scrutinising the audio quality through hifi headphones I am satisfied that it is true lossless. However I have not run a diagnostic audio program to determine specific details, I can only trust my technical application and my own ears. 🙂