This was something I'd had in mind for a long time..." says pianist Alexandre Tharaud, "to put together an album for the sheer pleasure of it, in collaboration with dear friends and paying tribute to the wonders of the piano duet repertoire." The aptly named 4 Hands offers 18 tracks, each just a few minutes in length, each featuring Tharaud sharing a piano keyboard with a different partner. The repertoire ranges wide - from Bach to Glass by way of such composers as Schubert, Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Fauré, Satie, Debussy, Ravel, Rachmaninoff, Ravel, and Piazzolla. 15 of Tharaud's fellow performers are celebrated pianists - among them the late Nicholas Angelich, Mariam Batsashvili, Bertrand Chamayou, David Fray, Víkingur Ólafsson, and Beatrice Rana. The other three, all stars in their musical fields, are shown in a new, pianistic light: cellist Gautier Capuçon, countertenor Philippe Jaroussky and singer-songwriter Juliette. "The piano duet is one of life's miracles," continues Tharaud. "First and foremost, it is the most intimate way of playing chamber music... It was a joy to record this album... If hearing these pieces prompts people to buy some sheet music and enjoy playing duets together - just as we did in the recording studio - then I will have achieved my aim.

Composed at the age of 19, Rachmaninov's earliest published cycle of piano pieces, the Morceaux de Fantaisie, contains the Pr�lude in C-sharp minor, destined to become his signature work, and the M�lodie in E major, much loved by Tchaikovsky. The expressive Morceaux de Salon show Tchaikovsky's influence and some of the grief felt by Rachmaninov after his mentor's death. With the inclusion of the melodically rich Nocturnes and the Four Pieces, the earliest to survive in his hand, this collection shows both the young composer finding his voice and the timeless Rachmaninov we recognise today.

Like Chopin before him, and even more closely Scriabin, Rachmaninoff yielded to the temptation of writing his 24 Preludes, assembling this emblematic number in three stages. It began with a youthful work: the famous Prelude in C-sharp minor. From this root, music deeply anchored in Russian soil, imbued with the Slavic soul to which the composer, later exiled, would remain forever attached, there would spring, a decade later, the Opus 23 set, followed seven years on by Opus 32. These Preludes are like images in an album that Jean-Baptiste Fonlupt invites us to leaf through, sonic paintings whose authentic colours of memory he poetically restores. Far from his native land, which he left for good, Rachmaninoff would never write this way again.

No wonder the stellar team of pianists Eric Zuber and Boris Slutsky found Rachmaninoff's works for two pianos irresistible. The two had a shared history: Mr. Slutsky was Mr. Zuber's piano teacher beginning when the latter was a mere 11. Here, instructor and student have now become equal partners with a shared aesthetic. "Like many pianists (and listeners), I've always felt deeply connected to Rachmaninoff's music," says Eric Zuber. "Precisely identifying what makes it resonate so profoundly with so many people is challenging, but for me, it's his sincerity of expression, emotional honesty, and exceptional craftsmanship in writing for the piano. Through his distinctive musical language, Rachmaninoff captures the complexities of human emotion-our joys, loves, and sorrows-in ways words alone cannot fully express.

In the year 2007 pianist and composer Alexander Warenberg reworked Rachmaninoff's second symphony into a full scale piano concerto. Ever since this works gained popularity and recognition as a new repertoire work, having been performed by acclaimed soloists and orchestras all around the world. Alexander Warenberg tackled the seemingly ludicrous task of changing the iconic second symphony into a work with an important piano part. Warenberg has meticulously reworked the four movements of the symphony into the regular three movements of Rachmaninoff's concertos. In this process the piece has been reduced by some 40% and several necessary re-orchestrations have been carried out. The result is more than just an interesting experiment, this spectacular, virtuoso concerto shows off Warenberg's unique talent as a 're-composer', and it conquered the hearts of those who love their Rachmaninoff. Pianist Wolfram Schmitt-Leonardy took it upon himself to familiarize himself with this entirely new score. And so did conductor Theodore Kuchar with the Janacek Philharmonic Orchestra. Their brilliant performance is a truly romantic one. The score is published by Boosey & Hawkes. A treat for any Rachmaninoff and piano lover!

RACHMANINOV FOR ROMANCE

PIANO CONCERTOS NOS. 1 & 3

Rachmaninoff's output of chamber music is small but all the more precious for that. Two absolute gems bear witness to the fact: these ‘elegiac trios’, which were produced by a young composer still indisputably under the influence of Tchaikovsky. However, Rachmaninoff’s personality is already fully present, reaching heights of emotion and expressiveness.

The pieces by Suk and Grieg add a further touch of character to the picture, which is painted with an exceptionally rich palette: the artistry of the phenomenal Trio Wanderer.

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REVIEWS:

The Rachmaninov Trios share not only a sombre soundworld but a clarity of line that’s captured engagingly in these lyrical yet unsentimental performances by the Trio Wanderer. The Wanderers’ performance, a notch faster than many, has an urgency that is highly persuasive. Grieg’s dark and impassioned Andante con moto fits right in after all this, and the disc is rounded off with a sweetly understated Elegie by Suk. – BBC Music Magazine

The Trio Wanderer’s new disc, centred around Rachmaninov’s youthful trios, has all the finesse and subtlety that we’ve long associated with this French ensemble. From the start, though, one thing struck me – how curiously un-Russian these pieces sound in their hands. It’s partly due to their emphasis on clarity of texture, together with a certain Classical restraint.

– Gramophone

In 2024, Riccardo Chailly and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra continued their acclaimed Rachmaninoff cycle with a concert spanning the composer's lifetime: from the youthful freshness of the composer's earliest works like the rarely performed "Youth Symphony" and his Piano Concerto No. 1, to the musical mastery and maturity of his last major work, the "Symphonic Dances". Young piano prodigy Alexander Malofeev, in whose repertoire Rachmaninoff's music occupies a special place, gave his much-lauded Lucerne Festival debut as the soloist of the evening with an electrifying performance.

In 2024, Riccardo Chailly and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra continued their acclaimed Rachmaninoff cycle with a concert spanning the composer's lifetime: from the youthful freshness of the composer's earliest works like the rarely performed "Youth Symphony" and his Piano Concerto No. 1, to the musical mastery and maturity of his last major work, the "Symphonic Dances". Young piano prodigy Alexander Malofeev, in whose repertoire Rachmaninoff's music occupies a special place, gave his much-lauded Lucerne Festival debut as the soloist of the evening with an electrifying performance.

John Wilson and Sinfoina of London complete their set of Rachmaninoff symphonies with this recording of the First Symphony and the Symphonic Dances. Rachmaninoff hoped that the First Symphony, composed in 1895, would build on the reputation of his graduation opera Aleko, which had proved a great success. The premiere, in St Petersburg in March 1897, was, however, a disaster. Rumour had it that the conductor, Alexander Glazunov, was drunk: true or false, it seems clear that he had little interest in the piece, leading to a raft of scathing reviews. This setback hit Rachmaninoff very deeply, and is considered by many to be the reason for the following three-year creative block only lifted by a course of hypnotherapy. Rachmaninoff left the score in Russia when he fled the revolution in 1917, and it was subsequently lost. Two years after his death it was reconstructed from a set of orchestral parts in the Leningrad Conservatory, and given it's second performance, in Moscow, in October 1945, since when it has gained it's place as standard orchestral repertoire around the world. The Symphonic Dances were written towards the very end of the composer's life, and started out in a version for two pianos, which Rachmaninoff performed with Vladimir Horowitz. He then set about orchestrating the work, which was first performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra and Eugene Ormandy in January 1941. Set in three movements, the Symphonic Dances reference the theme from the final movement of the First Symphony. In this recording, Sinfonia of London plays from John Wilson's own performing edition of the work.

Sergey Rachmaninoff's two Elegiac Trios became the pinnacle of Russian musical symbolism, forming an epigraph to the revolutionary upheavals that split Russian civilisation and Rachmaninoff's life in two. The moods of nostalgia and echoes of soulful longing found in these works are infused with ideas of death. The beautiful theme of the Trio elegiaque No. 1 in G minor transforms into a funeral march in the epilogue, while the complex Trio elegiaque No. 2 in D minor is a memorial to Tchaikovsky filled with powerfully prophetic symbols most notably the Dies irae motif.

Francesco Piemontesi, a BBC Music Magazine award-winning pianist and lauded as a 'wonderful Mozartian', has an intense curiosity about his fellow artists - their pianos, the sonorities they cultivate, the secret elements that animate their playing, and what drives them. In this documentary by Jan Schmidt-Garre, filmed over one year, Piemontesi talks with some of the world's leading performers, including his mentor Alfred Brendel, Maria Joao Pires, Stephen Kovacevich and Antonio Pappano, in a series of revealing encounters that illuminate their individual approaches to the instrument, it's colour and form. The film is complemented by a bonus 60-minute recital by Yulianna Avdeeva, Zlata Chochieva and Francesco Piemontesi, played on Rachmaninoff's Steinway piano at Villa Senar, his home in Switzerland during the 1930s.

Francesco Piemontesi, a BBC Music Magazine award-winning pianist and lauded as a 'wonderful Mozartian', has an intense curiosity about his fellow artists - their pianos, the sonorities they cultivate, the secret elements that animate their playing, and what drives them. In this documentary by Jan Schmidt-Garre, filmed over one year, Piemontesi talks with some of the world's leading performers, including his mentor Alfred Brendel, Maria Joao Pires, Stephen Kovacevich and Antonio Pappano, in a series of revealing encounters that illuminate their individual approaches to the instrument, it's colour and form. The film is complemented by a bonus 60-minute recital by Yulianna Avdeeva, Zlata Chochieva and Francesco Piemontesi, played on Rachmaninoff's Steinway piano at Villa Senar, his home in Switzerland during the 1930s.

Back in 2015, Fanfare singled out Ekaterina Litvintseva's first solo album of Rachmaninoff, including the Moments musicaux Op.16, as an 'impressive outing. Her playing is tonally rich and extremely thoughtful.' Since then, she has assembled an impressive and critically acclaimed catalogue on Piano Classics, including most recently the great Trio elegiaque which Rachmaninoff wrote in memory of Tchaikovsky: 'an attractive and valuable disc' (Fanfare). Litvintseva now turns to a trio of uncontested masterpieces by the Russian composer, demonstrating within a single album the range of his stylistic evolution over the course of 40 years. He was still a teenager, studying at the Moscow Conservatoire, when he wrote his First Piano Concerto in 1891. On the instruction of his teachers, he took the Grieg Concerto as a model, and poured his own invention into it: a remarkably successful strategy, as it turned out, because the finished work is both strong and personal, touched with many of those fingerprints of gesture and harmony which we have come to think of as quintessentially Rachmaninoff. These include flights of lyric fantasy and equally sudden, unexpected turns towards melancholy introspection. Rachmaninoff had become an international celebrity by 1913, when he took his family to live the high life with him in Rome, at a home which Tchaikovsky had once used. In the Italian capital he began work on the imposing Second Piano Sonata, though the work had to be completed back at the family estate, Ivanovka, when his daughters came down with typhus. Rachmaninoff overhauled the Sonata in 1931, cutting and in some places simplifying it's form, and it is this version which Litvintseva plays: a stylistic bridge between mid-period and late-style in a composer whose capacity for reinvention has often been underestimated. By 1941 he was an exile living in the US and Switzerland, where he wrote his Variations on a theme of Corelli - the 'La folia' theme adopted by countless of his predecessors. Informed by decades of pianistic and creative mastery, Rachmaninoff makes the theme his own with a neoclassical severity and haunting economy of expression. Thus, taken as a whole, Ekaterina Litvintseva's new album pays a wide-ranging and personal tribute to a composer who has inspired her playing since her formation in Siberia. - Ekaterina Litvintseva is one of the most remarkable pianists of her generation. Her recordings won her enthusiastic acclaim in the international press: "a notable moment in the history of Chopin interpretation" (Fanfare); "a sense of spontaneous invention" in Mozart's K.271 (Gramophone) and "an expressive depth" in Brahms's 1st Piano Concerto (BBC Music Magazine). She previously recorded for Piano Classics an album with piano works by Dora Pejacevic (PCL10226), as well as the Works for Piano and Orchestra by Chopin (PCL10142 and 10274), which was a CD Of The Week at Classic FM. - In this new release Litvintseva displays her innate feeling for the idiom in works by Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943): the youthfully exuberant First Piano Concerto, the monumental Second Piano Sonata and the innovative Corelli variations Op. 42, cornerstones of the piano repertoire nowadays, and played with vigour, drama and a deep sense of poetry. The concerto is accompanied by the Nordwestdeutsche Philharmonie, conducted by Vahan Mardirossian.

Classical Music

Symphonic in scale and with great dramatic power, Rachmaninoff's Piano Sonata No. 1 in D minor is an underappreciated masterpiece, depicting a tremendous range of human emotions. The turbulent and brilliant Piano Sonata No. 2 in B flat minor is heard in the 1931 revised version which clarifies textures and streamlines the work, heightening it's emotional impact. The Isle of the Dead employs Georgy Kirkor's 1957 transcription which Boris Giltburg has revised significantly. Giltburg's authority in Rachmaninoff has been universally acknowledged, with his performances termed 'characterful, sensitive and technically dazzling' by BBC Music Magazine (Naxos 8.574528).

REVIEW:

For all his technical ability and mastery of what is possible on the piano, Boris Giltburg is not a merciless technician, but a pianist who immerses himself in the music.

In the two Rachmaninoff sonatas, Giltburg draws us into a music that takes off without harshness, almost floating, and clearly tending toward Scriabin. The contrasts are made all the more exciting by the spontaneity of the playing, as are the magnificent, exciting melodic arcs with which he makes the piano sing.

The transcription of the symphonic poem ‘Isle of the Dead’ is also very successful, because Giltburg and Kirkur have obviously felt the dark and demonic secrets of this music very well. With his imaginative playing, Giltburg gives the piano a very active role, allowing it to act rather than merely reproduce impressions. The music of the Isle of the Dead shimmers in many colors and is full of dramatic power, full of life.

— Pizzicato

Cellist Philipp Schupelius, winner of the 2023 German Music Competition, has just been named one of the 30 most exciting young musicians by Classic FM. His debut album is being released on the GENUIN label as part of the Primavera series, created in collaboration with the German Music Council. Schupelius effortlessly bridges the gap between the Venetian Baroque of Antonio Vivaldi (with the finely nuanced accompaniment of the Metamorphosen Berlin Chamber Orchestra under the direction of Wolfgang Emanuel Schmidt) and the dazzling late-Romantic sounds of Sergei Rachmaninoff (brilliantly supported on piano by Yukino Kaihara). He masterfully captures both Vivaldi's delicate Baroque ornamentation and Rachmaninoff's sweeping passion!

RACHMANINOFF Symphony No. 3. Caprice bohémien. Prince Rostislav • Gianandrea Noseda, cond; BBC PO • CHANDOS 10677 (73:50)


Rachmaninoff’s Third Symphony, composed in 1935–36, has never gained the same traction as the Second or The Isle of the Dead , both composed some years before his departure from Russia in 1917; it is neither as lush as the Second—how could it be?—nor as muscular as the Symphonic Dances , his next, and last, composition. Aside from the difficulty Rachmaninoff had composing in exile, which has been well documented, I believe the Third Symphony and the Fourth Piano Concerto, both “problem” pieces, stand in similar relation to the Symphonic Dances and the Paganini Rhapsody , respectively: Just as the Fourth Concerto shows Rachmaninoff working out the difficulties of adapting to a familiar genre the leaner-textured and more harmonically bold style of his later solo piano works, so does the Third Symphony; and, in each case, the work that follows demonstrates his masterly solution to the problem. In other words, while the Third Symphony is a not-quite-comfortable juxtaposition of past and present in Rachmaninoff’s musical language, the Symphonic Dances expresses the complete assurance of his new style or manner, much in the same way an émigré writer’s second novel in his new country would exhibit greater security in its use of the new language.


Over the years I’ve found the recordings of the Third by the Philadelphia Orchestra, for which the symphony was written, generally satisfying: the composer’s own, supple 1939 version, and those by Eugene Ormandy, first a taut version on a mono LP and then a somewhat more luxuriant one in stereo. (The Dutoit recording for Decca is more problematic; see my review in Fanfare 35:1.) This new version by Gianandrea Noseda, however, demands consideration. For starters, the BBC Philharmonic sounds terrific; the strings are rich and full, as they must be in this work, and the many wind solos are superb. The statement of the first movement’s second theme near the end, by flute and clarinet two octaves apart, is meltingly beautiful. The ensemble in the tricky scherzo section of the second movement is dead-on. This may well be Britain’s finest orchestra these days.


Then there’s the contribution of Noseda himself. He’s a veteran Rachmaninoff conductor by now, having recorded all three symphonies and all three operas for Chandos; of the major works, only the Symphonic Dances and the choral-orchestral music remain. Fanfare’s critics have had mixed reactions to his previous Rachmaninoff recordings, but I find this one a real winner: Like the composer’s own version, tempos are flexible but never arbitrary, instead seeming to react to the music’s ebb and flow; climaxes are dynamic (and with Chandos’s sound, they can pack a wallop) but never exaggerated. Noseda takes the first-movement exposition repeat, now standard practice, but something neither Rachmaninoff (on 78s) nor Ormandy did.


The symphony, sensibly placed last on the disc, is complemented by two early works. The Caprice bohémien is a sonic showpiece, again with particularly beautiful wind solos. Noseda handles the gradual but relentless increase in speed in the latter portion nicely, making for a big finish. Prince Rostislav , from Rachmaninoff’s incredibly fruitful year of 1891—he was 18 years old!—is long on atmosphere if short on memorable thematic material; it owes a debt to Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sadko.


This is a first-rate recording. If, like me, you could use a well-wrought Rachmaninoff Third with the exposition repeat and in excellent modern sound, you need look no further.


FANFARE: Richard A. Kaplan


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There was once a trend among critics to downplay Rachmaninov's Symphony No. 3 likely stemming from mixed reviews at the work's premiere but beginning in the late 1970s the symphony has been re-evaluated several times and is today often recognized as an assured and thoroughly exciting Russian orchestral work, with appealing themes and a structure every bit as strong as the popular Symphonic Dances. In fact the dance rhythms of the Symphony's energetic finale are much akin to those in the Symphonic Dances as is the colorful orchestration. The work was written for Rachmaninov's favorite orchestra, the Philadelphia under Leopold Stokowski.

The album contains two other rarely heard works. The symphonic poem Prince Rostislav wherein the youthful composer shows the influence of his composition teacher Rimsky-Korsakov and, as with Rimsky-Korsakov's most popular works, is graced with eloquent, folk-like melody. Despite these appealing elements, the piece is overshadowed by Rachmaninov's later masterpieces. An even more rarely heard work is the Capriccio bohémien, which is luminously orchestrated and inspired by similar musical moments within the composer's opera Aleko.

Gianandrea Noseda continues this Chandos Rachmaninov series with excellent, well-recorded performances by the BBC Philharmonic who seem to be enjoying themselves within this passionate, fiery, luxurious music.

- Greg La Traille, ArkivMusic.com

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Rachmaninov, S.: Variations On A Theme of Corelli / Morceaux

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Great Piano Concertos - Rachmaninov, Respighi, Schmidt, Rave

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