The Team

A world-class team created the new audio master recordings of the album during the live concert:

Steve Epstein: producer for Sony Masterworks, has 11 Grammy awards and 27 Grammy nominations for his classical and jazz recordings. These include five Classical Producer of the Year Grammy awards.

Richard King: recording engineer and founder of RK Recording. He has long been associated with Sony Music Studios in New York. King has been the engineer with Yo-Yo Ma, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra and many revered classical pianists, such as Yefim Bronfman, Emanuel Ax, Murray Perahia, and Andre Previn. He has won seven Grammy Awards, including two for Best Engineered Classical Album, and one Latin Grammy Award.

Marc Wienert: piano voicer, brought his specialized skills in precisely adjusting piano acoustic behavior. His task for this new recording is unique; coordinating one piano’s timbre to pianos from more than 65 years earlier, to invoke a gorgeous sound – yet one Rachmaninoff would appreciate.

Richard Shepherd is a British electronics engineer who lives in North Yorkshire, UK. His background is in the design of complex instrumentation and control systems in the steel and petrochemicals industries. He was a co-founder of Spectra-Tek Ltd; a UK-based electronics systems company of which he was Technical Director, being influential in the creation of many high-accuracy flow measurement techniques employed in modern oil and gas systems worldwide. He sat on several oil industry committees and ISO working parties. After his retirement, he combined his wide technical knowledge with a life-long passion for classical piano music and developed an exceedingly high-accuracy reproducing piano system. He worked closely with Bösendorfer and Steinway, and now builds custom-made piano reproducing systems for clients' pianos, of which this Zenph Studios' Steinway is an example. This new implementation is based upon the SE system work of his friend Wayne Stahnke, founder of Live Performance, Inc.

Dr. Anatoly Larkin is the Project Manager at Zenph Studios for this album of Rachmaninoff re-performances. He was born near Moscow, Russia. At age 13, he and his family moved to Glasgow, Scotland. He attended Guildhall School of Music and Drama, studying composition with Robert Saxton and piano with Paul Roberts and Alexandra Andrievsky. During that time he was active in promoting new music, including premieres of his own works. He also pursued his passion for computers by getting familiar with the then-current computer technology used in electronic composition. He received a Master's degree from the University of Minnesota in 2004 and a Doctorate of Musical Arts in 2007, studying under Alexander Braginsky, co-founder of the International Piano-e-Competition. Dr. Larkin continues to compose and support new music.

Dr. John Q. Walker, Executive Producer, is president and co-founder of Zenph Studios. He is a seasoned entrepreneur, bringing strengths in vision, execution, and hiring. His career has been one of leading technology projects far ahead of the general public; he was a pioneer in the areas of high-speed networking, wireless LANs, and voice-over-IP (VoIP), for example. He brings 20 years experience in managing high-tech software development teams, at Zenph, IBM, and Ganymede Software. He co-founded Ganymede Software in RTP in 1995. During his five years as vice president of product development, Ganymede products consistently won "Best Product" and "Product of the Year" awards. He holds Bachelor degrees in piano and mathematics, a Master's in computer science, and a Ph.D. in software engineering from UNC Chapel Hill. His research focused on natural-behavior algorithms and computer graphics. He co-authored a book on VoIP for Cisco Press and also authored a software engineering book for McGraw-Hill. He is voting member of NARAS and is on the board of the Raleigh Chamber Music Guild.