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...

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.