4×4 Magazine From April 2016

Magazine's three-disc box set is a mess. Breaking the group's history down to two eras spread across the first two-thirds of the box and adding a fantastic and well-needed third disc dedicated solely to Peel Sessions, it's yet another multi-disc package that half-pleases both fan and neophyte. Only four of the 45 tracks come directly from the band's four studio LPs. Oddly enough, seven-tenths of the decent live album Play is strewn across the first two discs.

This recording features one of today’s most sought-after conductors, Vladimir Jurowski, who was appointed Principal Conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 2007, with many of his recordings on the LPO Label being chosen for special mentions by BBC Music Magazine and Gramophone Magazine. When Rachmaninoff finally settled in Switzerland in the early 1930s, it was here, in the tranquil surroundings he needed for inspiration, that he wrote the Third Symphony. Sir Henry Wood, writing in his autobiography My Life of Music (1938), predicted that Rachmaninoff’s Third Symphony would ‘prove as popular as Tchaikovsky’s Fifth’. These arrangements of Rachmaninoff’s 10 Songs were made by Vladimir Jurowski’s grandfather, also called Vladimir (1915–72), whose first experience of Rachmaninoff’s music was in Russia after the Second World War. He orchestrated 10 songs specifically for the celebrated Russian tenor Ivan Kozlovsky, who recorded them with the conductor Kiril Kondrashin.