Access to musical information isn’t guaranteed, whether it’s limited by the resolution of a recording, your audio system, or an oppressive political regime. George Vatchnadze, concert pianist and dealer in high-end audio equipment, has experience with all three.
Vatchnadze’s main early influence was his father, at their home in Georgia—the Eurasian country, not the US state—which was then part of the Soviet Union. “My father was a huge music lover, and very knowledgeable, and I grew up with records,” he told me in an interview by Skype. “In the Soviet Union, it was very difficult to get musical information because of the Iron Curtain. So, my father would chase American records on the black market (footnote 1) . . . Each record would cost 40 Soviet rubles, whereas the average salary of a Soviet citizen was 120 rubles. It was incredibly hard and expensive, so very few people were doing it. So, I grew up around records that nobody else there had. This is where it all started for me.”
Vatchnadze recalls his father taking him to see Aida. “That changed my life,” he told me. “I might have been 6 or 7, but I sat through all of it quietly and was absolutely mesmerized, especially when I saw the trumpets on the stage in the second act. I was just blown away.”
Vatchnadze has played piano at famous halls worldwide: the Mariinsky Theater; Covent Garden; Alice Tully Hall; Osaka’s The Symphony Hall; and others. He has made noteworthy recordings of the Rachmaninoff Concerto No.2 and Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand with the Tbilisi Symphony Orchestra, and of Prokofiev’s Sonatas No.6 and 9. His most recent recording, Kancheli: 33 Miniatures, with cellist Suren Bagratuni, was released in 2019 (footnote 2). Critic Faubion Bowers wrote, in American Record Guide, that Vatchnadze “is a consummate artist” who “can do absolutely anything he wants at the piano.” Vatchnadze also teaches piano, at DePaul University’s School of Music in Chiaago.
Vatchnadze is both a musician and an audiophile, but he believes that’s a rare combination. Why? He says it’s because musicians don’t need fidelity to process music, the technique and performance, even on bad or vintage recordings. “I don’t need a high-end system for that,” he told me.
Still, he cares—a lot—about sound, including the sound of his own recordings. “When I make a CD, … I want to hear it on a high-end system, absolutely,” Vatchnadze said. “I would like to hear it on different systems. I recorded Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto back in the ’90s, and then it was reissued with compression, which pissed me off beyond belief. They said, ‘Oh, [people] can’t hear the dynamic range in the car on a car stereo, so we have to compress it.'”
One of his favorite recordings to audition equipment with isn’t his own: It’s Horowitz in Moscow, the famous 1986 Moscow Conservatory recital that was broadcast live internationally. Vatchnadze remembers watching it on TV. The performance was captured digitally and released on CD by Deutsche Grammophon, then reissued in 2018 on vinyl, which he says isn’t as good (footnote 3). On the CD, “there are parts where the dynamic range is through the roof,” but “on the vinyl, it almost sounds like it’s going to take out the drivers.”
At the beginning of the Horowitz album, “there’s a Scarlatti sonata,” Vatchnadze told me in our interview. “I test all my systems with just that sonata, and if it doesn’t sound right, I’m not interested, because I know how that hall sounds. I know how Horowitz’s piano sounds because I played it once. I am a Steinway artist, and I tried it once when he was touring. He traveled with his piano, and they asked me to come in and play it. So that recording is sort of a benchmark for me. And I think that live recordings should be benchmarks, because if they don’t transport you into the recording space, or bring that into your house—if that’s not happening, then I’m not interested.”
The conveyance of musical information influences the choice of equipment he carries at his dealership. Mostly he seeks accuracy, or realism, but the emotions it provokes must also resemble what you can experience at a live event. “It will never be the same, but it can get pretty darned close,” he told me. What equipment have those criteria led him to? The webpage for his dealership lists 27 brands, from Acoustic Signature to Zanden (footnote 4).
Vatchnadze founded Kyomi Audio in 2007, in Michigan. In 2011, he and his wife—Kyomi, also a concert pianist—moved to Chicago, both taking positions at DePaul University. (Kyomi is not involved in the business that bears her name except that she participates in most listening tests and product evaluations.)
Before the pandemic hit, Kyomi Audio had just moved into a new brick-and-mortar store, in Addison, a western suburb of Chicago. The grand opening celebration, scheduled for this spring, was delayed. The store is open by appointment with pandemic precautions in place.
Vatchnadze says his goal is to maintain the hobby feel in his business. “Yeah, the joy and the passion for it. I haven’t lost it, and I’m not planning on doing that.”
Footnote 1: One wonders if he ever bought records from Alex Halberstadt’s father; see this month’s My Back Pages.
Footnote 2: Several of his recordings are available at prestomusic.com.
Footnote 3: Horowitz in Moscow was initially issued on vinyl in Germany, and that gatefold LP sold so well that it is still common and affordable even in the US.—Editor
Footnote 4: See kyomiaudio.com/brands.html.
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