Modest Moussorgski (1839-1881)
Tableaux d'une expostion

Markus Schirmer, piano (piano Fazioli F-278)

Some years ago, the first LP in the “play backwards“ procedure astounded the specialist world and customers alike. Playing an LP backwards – is that actually possible? It is indeed possible, as the thoroughly successful vinyl production “oreloB“ (TACET L 207) and some following items (TACET L 977, L 219, L 240, L 242) have proven. And it offers considerable advantages under certain circumstances. For example, the farther the pick-up arm moves towards the inside with the usual scanning, the more difficult it is to scan larger deflections, for the number of revolutions of the turntable remains constant and the distance covered by the needle decreases. The deflections are often so narrow that the needle no longer fits properly into the groove at all, but merely “chases across” the surface. It happens quite often that the music ends more loudly than it began – more often than vice versa. With backwards transfer, the system manages better in all these instances. In this way, the music can also be transferred more loudly as a whole, standing out more clearly from the noise made by the disc. The question raised by “oreloB” – namely why LPs were not originally made from the inside to the outside – has remained unanswered to the present day. Also for the ”Pictures” the volume progression on side 2 made it obviously necessary to cut backwards. – Not to worry – nothing can go wrong during playback. If the needle is placed on the outside by mistake or out of habit, it will end up in the infinite loop of the lead-out groove. If it is lowered too far towards the inside, nothing bad can happen, either. The right lead-in groove begins about 7 cm from the middle hole, not completely inside, so as not to trigger off the limit switch, amongst other things. That is where the needle must go in. For good measure the cutting was done in halfspeed: double maximum frequency response. The result of all efforts: Pure fun with a spectacular work in spectacular playback quality, splendidly played by Markus Schirmer!