Reviewing Ashkenazy's most recent Rachmaninov Third (with Haitink and the Concertgebouw, Decca 417 239-2DH, 11/86) I made passing mention of Berman's performance, entering a caveat about CBS's recording quality. Now pleasure at its reappearance on CD is again mixed with dismay at the recording's flat perspectives, congested climaxes and desiccated piano sound.
Still, all things are relative. EMI's recording of Pennario and the Philharmonia shows that an even more stodgy, mothballed quality is indeed possible to achieve. In this case recording and solo playing are well matched, since Pennario's phrasing alternates between the too rigid and the too soggy, with an uncanny avoidance of the happy medium.
By contrast Berman fully deserves reinstatement in the catalogue, although his is a curious performance in many ways. Like so many of his recordings and live performances in the 1970s it tempers an awesome natural virtuosity with a rather self-conscious and not fully formed poetic sensibility. There is the slight ungainliness, but also the fascination and presence, of a half-civilized wild man in polite company. When he gives his instincts full rein Berman is virtually unsurpassed. Such a passage is the 'big' first movement cadenza where extra reserves of power enable him to show its structural role to thrilling effect. Elsewhere the flow of the music tends to stagnate because of an over-affectionate dwelling on detail.
Ashkenazy with Previn is a fine example, possibly the very finest, of the modern 'mainstream' approach to the concerto in which heroic suffering and yearning are balanced by vehement self-assertion and energy. Once in a while limitations of physique, or rather Ashkenazy's tendency to overcompensate for those limitations, show through—as when that same cadenza degenerates to a succession of very loud chords (the Preludes show this tendency reaching almost comic proportions—Vlad the Impaler lives again). Similarly, the merest glimpse of a rallentando is liable to produce excessive lingering. These things are far more pronounced than on his earlier Decca LP recording with Fistoulari which remains a personal favourite of mine, not least because the LSO sound so much more idiomatic than with Previn or Abbado. But the newly-reissued Decca is finely integrated, excellently recorded, and at mid price makes a safe recommendation for the first-time buyer.
And after such a 'safe' recommendation a vital corrective would be something from an alternative tradition, of which there is no finer representative than the composer's own recording. Like so many composers in their own music Rachmaninov shows that movement, rather than expressiveness, is the prime concern. He is uniformly faster and lighter than almost all modern soloists (exceptions are Horowitz and Argerich—the latter has yet to be enticed to the studio but having just seen her performance on video I can vouch for its astonishing virtuosity). You can take this different ways. You can say that slower performances, however beautiful they may be, tend to emphasize those qualities in the music which are perfectly obvious anyway or alternatively that fast tempos are all very weli for those who know the music inside out but needn't be forced upon others who would like to savour it; or again that Rachmaninov's tempos might conceivably have been dictated by his mood on the day or by extra-musical circumstances—certainly it is difficult to come to terms with some of the throwaway gestures and with the cuts which weaken the structure of all three movements. The Second Concerto does not suffer from these disfigurements, although you still have to accept some scrambled moments and to use a certain amount of imagination to recreate the sound (which remains ill-defined in the bass and generally emaciated). What is without question is the immense strength of character behind the playing in both works; this remains an inspiration and will remain so long after more cautious readings have faded into oblivion.'