From the notes I read that this is a 'live' test-recording, meaning that the Techs are walking around and coughing, setting up or moving mics, basically destroying one of the worlds most rare recordings with no real audience around and the floors creak around like the are moving props on the set of Alice in Wonderland - one of them horribly coughs right before the crazy broken-octave section which is a revelation how Rach plays the passages - Amazingly he does it at a great pause which could be edited out nicely without removing too much of the actual piano playing. They probably thought he was just another crazy Euro/Russian composer of the day because he would still out-live this recording about 15-years. I have an old Encyclopedia all about music from about 1948 it is nearly 3,000 pages long and edited by Slonimsky - In the middle of the book they have the only photos-section that is HQ printing and half of the musicians they regarded as big ones of the day and those to come have all changed, some forgotten, some forgotten ones like Florence Price obtaining some recent Renaissance. How many guys are in the recording walking around and moving nothing that needs to be moved? It sounds like at least ten - you can hear one of them speak a few times but it's so muffled its hard to determine what kind of sandwich he is trying to order. The guys behind the booth doing the actual testing with tape/record (probably tape?) say, hey I want to test a recording, therefore can all ten of you walk around with as many ladders and chairs as possible and also order me a sub sandwich with extra-cheese? It's gonna sound great in that test-recording.
This is from Marston Records Rachmaninoff plays Symphonic Dances release. Here's what they wrote about it. "The others, also included here, are dimly recorded fragments of ballades by Liszt and Brahms from a Saturday matinee recital in Philadelphia (5 December 1931), picked up by engineers preparing to record another concert later in the day" -There's also a fragment of Rachmaninoff playing the Brahms 2nd Ballade from the same recital
