Rachmaninov’s First Piano Sonata will never be one of his most popular works. It doesn’t have the thematic memorability of his piano miniatures, and its huge structure is rather unwieldy; in the wrong hands it can sound overladen with pianistic rhetoric at the expense of musical invention. Of all Rachmaninov’s output, this work needs a special personality and advocacy, with a strong sense of focus and formal cohesion. Biret’s performance (which begins with a curious misreading in bar 7, where she doubles the note values) lacks poetic subtlety, the gestures made in rather blunt terms with coarse textures at louder dynamics. Although her temperament is suited to Rachmaninov’s grand manner, to his arching phrases and sense of ebb and flow, she blusters her way through much of the score. The passionate drive of the first movement and the demonic intensity of the finale are too often disrupted by lumpy textures and jerky inflexions; nor does she quite capture the second movement’s indelibly Russian melancholy. This is a difficult piece to put across, but listen to Berezovsky’s dramatic and acutely imaginative interpretation and you can appreciate how powerful the work can be.
The Second Sonata – given here in its original version, without the damaging cuts Rachmaninov later imposed – shows Biret’s keenness to project the work’s grandiloquence. Her playing is not without style, but again too often it degenerates into crude generalizations and bombast. There is little warmth of sonority at forte level and the big tunes shout rather than resound, the image more of blaring trumpets than soaring strings. If it is the true grand manner you want, with the full complement of expressive contrast, tonal palette, huge sound, visceral excitement and a thousand volts of technique, then Horowitz is your man (either on RCA or, my preference, Sony Classical – i.e. his 1968 live recording originally on Columbia Masterworks). By comparison (a cruel one, I know: in this piece Horowitz is incomparable), Biret’s performance is almost like a caricature. The dry recorded sound is unflattering.'