Abbey Simon, St. Louis Symphony Orchestra And Leonard Slatkin Rachmaninoff: Piano Concertos Nos. 1 & 4

With over 35 million views, Anna Fedorova's live performance of Rachmaninoff's 2nd Piano Concerto is the most viewed classical concerto video on YouTube. We are proud to release the long-awaited studio recording of this beloved concerto, together with Rachmaninoff's 4th Piano Concerto.

Shostakovich's two Piano Concertos lack the seriousness of this four concertos for violin or cello. The first is actually a "double" concerto, having an important part for solo trumpet. It's an early but expertly written work sharing the same musical climate as the First Symphony. The Second Concerto was created for the composer's son Maxim, now a well-known conductor. It's a light- hearted, tongue-in-cheek piece with a Romantic slow movement.

Sequiera Costa is a legend among pianists. In 1951 he was honoured with the Grand Prix de Paris at the Marguerite Long International Competition. Since receiving that momentous honour, he has played an important role in music history in our time. Dmitri Shostakovich invited him to join a distinguished body of jurors, which included Sviatoslav Richter, Dimitri Kabalevsky, Aram Khachaturian and Emil Gilels, for the First International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow. As the youngest member of this prestigious jury, he was only a few years older than Van Cliburn, the winner of the competition.

Despite the recording dates, the sound and balance are superb, and there's nothing to cloud your sense of Ashkenazy's greatness in all these works. From him every page declares Rachmaninov's nationality, his indelibly Russian nature. What nobility of feeling and what dark regions of the imagination he relishes and explores in page after page of the Third Concerto. Significantly his opening is a very moderate Allegro ma non tanto, later allowing him an expansiveness and imaginative scope hard to find in other more 'driven' or hectic performances. His rubato is as natural as it's distinctive, and his way of easing from one idea to another shows him at his most intimately and romantically responsive.

To celebrate the 150th birthday of Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943), Yuja Wang joined the L.A. Philharmonic under the baton of Gustavo Dudamel to perform all four of the composer's piano concertos and his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini over two consecutive weekends. This ambitious project took place at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the city where Rachmaninoff spent the last months of his life.

More superlative performances of early 19th-century concerto repertoire from Howard Shelley and his Tasmanian Orchestra. Following on the heels of Moscheles and Herz, this time it’s Kalkbrenner, another of those virtuosi hugely acclaimed in their time and now forgotten. Kalkbrenner’s music bridges the gap between the classical and romantic styles and such was his fame that his presence in Paris resulted in that city becoming the pianistic centre of the romantic movement in the 1830s with Chopin, Liszt and Thalberg all basing themselves there; indeed Chopin originally planned to study with the older composer, only declining when Kalkbrenner told him he must not play in public for three years while under his tutelage.

This Naxos CD was released in 1998 and features 1995 recordings of Rachmaninov's Piano Concertos Nos. 1 and 4 with the considerable bonus of the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op.43. As is often the case with Naxos orchestral recordings of this vintage, the sound is a little distant but opens up to reveal more than adequate engineering at higher volume levels.