Rachmaninov's Complete Piano Concertos
Rachmaninov's Complete Piano Concertos
The Gramophone Choice
Piano Concertos Nos 1-4
Vladimir Ashkenazy pf London Symphony Orchestra / André Previn
Double Decca 444 839-2DF2 (135' · ADD) Recorded 1970-72. Buy from Amazon
Despite the recording dates, the sound and balance are superb, and there’s nothing to cloud your sense of Ashkenazy’s greatness in all these works. From him every page declares Rachmaninov’s nationality, his indelibly Russian nature. What nobility of feeling and what dark regions of the imagination he relishes and explores in page after page of the Third Concerto. Significantly his opening is a very moderate Allegro ma non tanto, later allowing him an expansiveness and imaginative scope hard to find in other more ‘driven’ or hectic performances. His rubato is as natural as it’s distinctive, and his way of easing from one idea to another shows him at his most intimately and romantically responsive. There are no cuts, and his choice of the bigger of the two cadenzas is entirely apt, given the breadth of his conception. Even the skittering figurations and volleys of repeated notes just before the close of the central Intermezzo can’t tempt Ashkenazy into display and he’s quicker than any other pianist to find a touch of wistfulness beneath Rachmaninov’s occasional outer playfulness (the scherzando episode in the finale).
Such imaginative fervour and delicacy are just as central to Ashkenazy’s other performances. His steep unmarked decrescendo at the close of the First Concerto’s opening rhetorical gesture is symptomatic of his Romantic bias, his love of the music’s interior glow. And despite his prodigious command in, say, the final pages of both the First and Fourth Concertos, there’s never a hint of bombast or a more superficial brand of fire-and-brimstone virtuosity. Previn works hand in glove with his soloist. Clearly, this is no one-night partnership but the product of the greatest musical sympathy. The opening of the Third Concerto’s Intermezzo could hardly be given with a more idiomatic, brooding melancholy, a perfect introduction for all that’s to follow. If you want playing which captures Rachmaninov’s always elusive, opalescent centre then Ashkenazy is hard to beat.
Additional Recommendations
Piano Concertos Nos 1-4. Paganini Rhapsody
Stephen Hough pf Dallas Symphony Orchestra / Andrew Litton
Hyperion CDA67501/2 (146‘ · DDD) Concertos recorded live 2004. Buy from Amazon
Hough. Litton. Rachmaninov concertos. Hyperion. Already a mouth-watering prospect, isn’t it? So, like the old Fry’s Five Boys chocolate advert, does Anticipation match Realisation in these five much-recorded confections?
The answer is ‘yes’ on almost every level. Culled from one or more live performances the concertos may be, but they manifest a real sense of occasion. Hough has clearly been burning to record these pieces for years. Litton is one of the world’s most adept accompanists. He and his Dallas players offer exemplary support, with bright precision, purring strings and a judiciously blended brass section. A handsomely voiced piano brings a near-perfect balance; only in the final pages of the studio-made Paganini Rhapsody does Hough struggle to make himself heard. Unlike most of his peers, he takes the composer at his word (scores and recordings) in matters of tempo, dynamics and the performance practice of Rachmaninov’s musical language, as he makes clear in a trenchant apologia in the superb booklet-note (by David Fanning).
Where Wild and Argerich seem glib in the cadenzas of the First and Third Concertos respectively, Hough imparts the right sense of heroic struggle; not even Rachmaninov caresses the second subject of the First Concerto’s finale so beguilingly; the notoriously tricky opening pages of the Second Concerto’s finale are dispatched with breathtaking élan, as is the last movement of the Third Concerto. It’s quite an achievement when each of Hough’s five performances rivals the greatest versions recorded individually by other pianists (the younger Horowitz in the Third, for example, Michelangeli in the Fourth). As a competitive set, that from the much-lamented Rafael Orozco comes close to matching Hough’s fleet-fingered ardour, but is less impressively recorded; Howard Shelley offers a convincing, slower alternative with powerful, weighty tone. Overall, though, only Earl Wild (see below) and, before that, Rachmaninov himself truly convey the composer’s intentions with such miraculous fluency, passion and stylistic integrity.
Piano Concertos Nos 1-4. Paganini Rhapsody
Earl Wild pf Royal Philharmonic Orchestra / Jascha Horenstein
Chandos CHAN10078 (134‘ · ADD) Recorded 1965. Buy from Amazon
Such is the luxuriance of sound revealed in these remasterings, it’s difficult to believe the recording date; and such is the quality of the piano-playing that it’s easy to understand why Chandos should have wanted to go to such trouble. There aren’t so many Rachmaninov pianists who dare to throw caution to the wind to the extent that Earl Wild does in the outer movements of the First Concerto, fewer still who can keep their technical poise in the process. The improvisatory feel to the lyricism of the slow movement is no less remarkable. Wild’s panache is every bit as seductive in No 4, and the Paganini Rhapsody is a rare example of a performance faster than the composer’s own – devilishly driven in the early variations and with tension maintained through the following slower ones so that the famous 18th can register as a release from a suffocating grip, rather than an overblown, out-of-context exercise in grandiosity. Because of his lightness and touch, Wild’s tempi never seem excessive. Undoubtedly he shifts the balance from languishing pathos and overwhelming grandeur towards straightforward exuberance; but that may be no bad thing for refreshing our view of the composer. It keeps us in touch with an earlier tradition. The RPO appears to be revelling in the whole affair, in a way one wouldn’t have immediately associated with Horenstein. To pick on the very few weaknesses, the very relaxed clarinet tone in the slow movement of Concerto No 2 rather misses the character, and elsewhere in this work the balance engineers rather crudely stick a microphone under the cello section’s nostrils. But then, the solo playing in this concerto is generally a little disappointing too, as though Wild had actually played the piece rather too often. In No 3 there are the hateful cuts to contend with, and one senses that the performance has been rather thoughtlessly modelled on the composer’s own, idiosyncrasies and all. None the less, for the sake of the outstanding performances of Nos 1 and 4 and the Rhapsody, and for the unique combination of old-style bravura and modern sound, this issue earns a strong recommendation.
