Since John Ogdon’s pioneering 1967 account of the two Rachmaninov piano sonatas for RCA, these long, demanding and once unfamiliar works have firmly established themselves in the canon of Rachmaninov’s output, recorded by some of the finest pianists of our time. This new album from Boris Giltburg also includes a fascinating and surprisingly successful 1957 transcription by Georgy Kirkor of Rachmaninov’s orchestral tone poem The Isle of the Dead, extensively revised and magnificently played by Giltburg.

The two sonatas (1908 and 1913 respectively) represent Rachmaninov at the peak of his powers and both were subsequently revised by the composer: the First Sonata shortly after the first performance (see the interview with Lukas Geniušas in IP, October 2023) and the Second Sonata in 1931, the version that Giltburg has chosen for this recording. He makes a decent argument for the revised edition and cites the usual canard that the revision ‘clarifies textures and streamlines the work’; but unfortunately the often-recorded 1931 version was a ruthless cut-and-paste job by a neurotic Rachmaninov, who wanted to include it in his concerts but thought the work too long for his American audiences. Horowitz felt Rachmaninov had gone too far and made – with the composer’s consent – his own amalgamation of the two versions, and others including Sudbin, Osborne and Lugansky have done something similar. I suspect listeners are sophisticated enough to appreciate Rachmaninov’s original conception.

One of the most attractive aspects of Rachmaninov’s music is his irresistible combination of lithe muscularity and gossamer delicacy. As recorded here, Giltburg has plenty of the former but not enough of the latter, and it isn’t entirely Giltburg’s fault. Rachmaninov’s dense textures and complex harmonic language are always subordinate to a singing melodic line, which isn’t as prominent here as it should be, partly because of the bass-heavy recorded balance and the plummy richness of the tenor register of the Fazioli, which is just too loud and gives undue emphasis to textural figurations that drown out Giltburg’s valiant attempts to voice up the melody. One aspect of Giltburg’s playing I do take issue with is his somewhat Chopinesque use of rubato. Rachmaninov was extremely precise in his rhythmic notation – carefully incorporating rhythmic displacement into the texture – but Giltburg sometimes overlays this with an unnecessary layer of rubato that reduces rather than enhances the dramatic impact and weakens the underlying rhythmic propulsion of the music.

This review originally appeared in the SUMMER 2025 issue of International Piano – Subscribe Today