Vespers - a cycle of religious services celebrated by the followers of the Orthodox Church on the eve of all feasts and each Little Pascha - i.e. Sunday. Vechernya, povecherye and utrenya are celebrated from evening to dawn. Among numerous composers who have developed the text of Vespers, it is Sergey Rachmaninoff that stands out due to his mastery of form. Carefully selected sounds of discreetly modern harmony render the acoustics of an Eastern Orthodox temple. Changes of cast (from three to eleven voices) and polychorality depict a sui generis theatrical nature of Orthodox Church ceremonies whose action evolves on a few levels, in different space points of the temple. It is particularly the sonorous, crystalline registers of female voices that contrast and perfectly combine with the male voices, among which the basso profondo basses, rarely found in the Western culture, have a profound meaning. The Podlasie Opera and Philharmonic Choir, also due to their artistic levels, guarantee the highest performance level of this kind of music in Poland.

The transcripts of Sergey Rachmaninov enjoyed great respect among pianists during the composer’s lifetime. In addition to piano concertos, preludes, etudes and Variations on a Theme of Correlli, Rachmaninov’s arrangements were gradually becoming the composer’s showcase. On the one hand, each work of this kind enables the display of purely virtuoso skills, while on the other, due to the often dense texture, it prompts us to seek a way of presenting harmonic and polyphonic consonances. This album by Ivan Shemchuk includes a collection of these piano arrangements, enriched with the popular cycle of 6 Morceaux for 4 hands, op. 11.

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Exactly 80 years before the Opening Concert of the 2019 Lucerne Festival, Sergei Rachmaninoff himself appeared for the first time on August 11, 1939 at the "International Music Festival Weeks". The roaring success of the performance stands in direct contrast to the need for retreat, seclusion and concentration that the star pianist sought as a composer. Marking three stages in his career, the concerto, étude, vocalise and symphony presented in 2019 take the listener to these places of retreat. And yet, they call to mind phenomena of public perception that still influence the way they are received today. In their diversity, these works invite us to appreciate the versatility of this extraordinary artist, to question, break through and expand patterns of perception.

 

REVIEW:

 

The pianist is musically involved, and so is Chailly. However unexpectedly, they form a superb partnership, and the entire reading is suffused with unabashed Romanticism. Matsuev shows himself perfectly willing to play delicate passages with the appropriate lyricism. The opening theme is unusually gentle, in fact. The impression of effortless virtuosity is especially vivid in the finale, where the pianist is magisterial. I would call this a Gilels-like performance in its authority and breadth rather than an electrifying Horowitz-like one. But it’s thrilling nonetheless.

 

– Fanfare

Classical Music

Classical Music

Emil Gilels Legacy, Vol. 7: Rachmaninoff

Classical Music

Early Exclusive: This title will ship exclusively to ArkivMusic customers starting on January 12th, 2018, three weeks before its wide street date!

Over the course of almost 10 years, Yevgeny Sudbin has been recording Sergei Rachmaninov’s works for piano and orchestra. The journey began in the U.S.A. in 2008 with the Fourth Piano Concerto in what Classic FM Magazine described as ‘a glorious recording’ with the North Carolina Symphony Orchestra under Grant Llewellyn. For the Paganini Variations and Piano Concerto No. 1, Sudbin continued to Asia and highly praised collaborations with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra and conductor Lan Shui. Reviewers remarked on the soloist’s ‘transcendental virtuosity and kaleidoscopic keyboard colour’ (BBC Music Magazine) and enjoyed piano-playing with ‘depth of tone, subtlety and richness of texture, and scintillating dynamism allied to acute lyrical sensibility’ (Gramophone). The grand finale of the cycle combines the two most popular of Rachmaninov’s concertos – No. 2 in C minor and No. 3 in D minor – but it also constitutes a home-coming of a kind, as it was recorded in London, Yevgeny Sudbin’s base since 1997. For his partners in these monumental and almost iconic concertos, Sudbin has chosen the BBC Symphony Orchestra and its chief conductor Sakari Oramo.

Pianist and conductor Boris Bloch has long been regarded as one of the most important interpreters of classical and romantic piano music. Volume 5 on Ars Produktion contains live recordings of Rachmaninov's piano works.

Written over a period of 18 years, Rachmaninov’s sets of Preludes are a mirror and a record of his compositional development. With so rich a variety of character, color, texture, and mood, no two preludes are fully alike, and differentiation of tempo and register ensures that each prelude’s character is clearly defined. The first eleven pieces were conceived by Rachmaninov as a single cycle, and their full-hearted Romanticism contrasts with the significantly more angular, modernistic Op. 32. Whether evoking ballad or bell toll, the exotic or folk influences, the Preludes stand in the great tradition of works by Bach and Chopin written in all 24 major and minor keys.



REVIEW:

Giltburg's sensitivity is abundantly demonstrated here; he’s always careful to avoid climaxes becoming overbearing or, heaven forbid, percussive. The G flat major Prelude that ends Op 23 is a good example of his songfulness, while the fifth of the Op 32 set has a lovely airborne quality, better conveying its flickering delicacy than Lugansky, who is a shade slower. In a similar vein, the eighth Prelude of Op 23 is another highlight.

 

Giltburg’s preoccupation with clarity of texture means that the tumultuous climax of Op 32 No 8 in A minor never becomes overbearing; he dispatches it with ease. This is followed by a wonderfully rich reading of the A major Prelude, while the siciliano rhythm of No 10 has a solemn tread. The gruff march of No 5 has more potency in the hands of Lugansky, though the inner section is done with great sensitivity, Giltburg revealing the duetting lines quite beautifully.

 

The driving drama of the C major Prelude that opens Op 32 also has more poetry than in many accounts. The closing Prelude of Op 32 sums up Giltburg’s approach – opening with a quietude that harks back to the early C sharp minor Prelude, while the turmoil that follows is presented with an absolute command of texture and clarity but without the storminess some bring to it, though its closing chords have a glorious richness.

– Gramophone

Mozart, W.A.: Sonata for 2 Pianos, K. 448 / Rachmaninov, S.:

Versatile cellist Christoph Croisé indulges in his passion for romantic Russian repertoire, coming together with close collaborators violinist Andrey Baranov and pianist Alexander Panfilov for a recording of works by a young Rachmaninoff. All of the works on this album were written before 1917, the year that the composer left Russia in the wake of the Revolution, and eventually emigrated to the United States.

The prodigious Rachmaninoff wrote his single-movement Trio élégiaque in G minor in 1892, when he was just 18 years old. A year later, he put pen to paper to compose his second Trio élégiaque, in D minor, on the eve of the death of his friend and mentor Tchaikovsky, to whom he dedicated the work. Both trios are imbued with an air of nostalgia and melancholy that belie the composer’s youthfulness. Christoph and his colleagues offer as encores a selection of songs arranged for piano trio by Alexander Panfilov: “How Fair This Spot” and "Lilacs" from Rachmaninoff’s 12 Romances, Op. 21, part of a set written during his honeymoon; and "The Dream" and "Daisies" from his Op. 38 collection Six Romances (1916). The album ends appropriately with an arrangement of "Autumn Song" from Tchaikovsky’s solo piano work The Seasons.

Leonard Slatkin’s Vox recordings of Rachmaninoff’s orchestral works revealed him to be a great advocate for this composer’s music – a position he still holds to this day. These recordings with the St. Louis Symphony achieved classic status upon release in the early 1980s. This is the seventh issue with these artists in the Vox series of Rachmaninoff’s orchestral works newly remastered from the original tapes.

The Elite Recordings for Vox by legendary producers Marc Aubort and Joanna Nickrenz are considered by audiophiles to be amongst the finest sounding examples of orchestral recordings.

Early recordings by one of today’s pre-eminent interpreters of Rachmaninoff.

The Ukrainian pianist Anna Fedorova is renowned for her playing of Rachmaninoff, and in particular the four concertos which she has performed across the world. She made these recordings in 2014, at a relatively early stage in her career, but they capture the rhythmic flexibility and feeling for phrase and emotion which give her interpretation of this music its particular signature.

In these familiar works, Fedorova searches for simplicity over sentimentality, because ‘simplicity can be more moving. Or if you have a special harmonic moment in a long phrase, you lead into it without too many distractions on the way. Then the surprise – the resolution or the twist – is all the more special. You have to train yourself to do this.’ On the page, both works bely their strong melodic flow with densely worked, filigree exchanges between piano and orchestra which demand as much analytical and technical grasp of the notes as the concertos of Brahms.

Rachmaninoff himself famously let his emotions speak through his music, which can be all the more moving for its restraint and close observance to the score, and Fedorova has spent decades with these concertos, absorbing them within her musical bloodstream so that their expressions of passion and nostalgia come as second nature to her.

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