Many readers will recall Noriko Ogawa’s Third Prize at the 1987 Leeds International Piano Competition. Since that time she has played extensively in England, her native Japan and elsewhere and, as this record declares, she is an admirably fluent and musicianly pianist. Allowing Rachmaninov to tell his own tale without impediment or idiosyncrasy she ensures a tasteful continuity and the integration of even the most turbulent dramas into a wider musical context. Yet her tact and quality seem slim attributes when set beside Rachmaninov’s rhetoric or his darker, more opalescent confidences. Admiring her avoidance of fancy steps, so to speak, and hysteria, I suddenly recalled Horowitz’s dictum, “without temperament, nothing” (and no pianist has shown more temperament in Rachmaninov than that arch-Merlin of the keyboard). Is the Second Concerto’s finale really Allegro scherzando, and where is the increase in impetus during the Third Concerto’s first movement – from Allegro non tanto to piu mosso and piu vivo? Surprisingly, given the sobriety of her reading, Ogawa chooses the more opulent of the two cadenzas but, again, her playing lacks the necessary voltage, and the finale ends with a broadening of tempo hard to square with the composer’s request for vivacissimo and un poco meno mosso.
The Malmo Symphony Orchestra under Owain Arwel Hughes generate more excitement and BIS’s sound is convincingly bold and spacious. But listeners wanting this particular coupling should opt for Lilya Zilberstein’s less circumscribed, more idiomatic DG disc. Yet cruelly but inevitably it has to be said that you only have to listen to a page or a paragraph of, say, Richter or Ashkenazy in the Second Concerto and Cliburn (RCA, 10/59 – sadly not yet available in this country on CD), Horowitz (most notably with Barbirolli), Gilels or Argerich in the Third Concerto to enter another world of technique and musicianship, of passion and charisma. Rachmaninov is, of course, incomparable in both concertos.'