Rachmaninov Concerto No. 3 in D Minor op 30

Serge Rachmaninoff himself played his Third Piano Concerto in 1911 in the Netherlands with the Concertgebouworkest and Willem Mengelberg. He noted at the time: "The musicians thought it was beautiful, but the audience and the critics did not." In the end, pianist Vladimir Horowitz was able to inspire the audience for the work, and today 'Rach 3' is considered to be one of the warhorses in the repertoire. With this notoriously difficult concerto the young Uzbek pianist Behzod Abduraimov made his dazzling Concertgebouworkest debut under the direction of Valery Gergiev.

The Chineke! Orchestra return to disc on Signum in a new live orchestral recording from the Royal Festival Hall, London.

Ashkenazy long ago reached the stage where he can control and shape every nuance in this teeming piano part and keep poetry and structure in a satisfying balance. Some of his phrasing is uniquely beguiling—the swooning surge into fig. 4 is one of a host of treasurable details on the new recording and it is typical of his sensitivity to emotional ebb and flow. He has always had a special insight into the long plateau before the final peroration, and the spaciousness of the recording emphasizes how beautifully he floats the tone in lyrical passages and how intelligently he withdraws to let the orchestral contribution through.

Gramophone, 11/1986

Santiago Rodriguez - Concert Pianist, Silver Medallist, VI Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, Professor of Piano, University of Maryland Santiago Rodriguez has been called “a phenomenal pianist” (The New York Times) and “among the finest pianists in the world” (The Baltimore Sun). He performs internationally with leading orchestras, including the London Symphony, the Dresden Staatskapelle, the Weimar Philharmonic, the Yomiuri-Nippon Symphony Orchestra of Japan, the Seoul Symphony Orchestra, the Tampere Philharmonic of Finland, the Berliner Symphoniker, the Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore, Seattle, Indianapolis, American Composers’, and Houston Symphony Orchestras, the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington, D.C., and the American Symphony Orchestra at Avery Fisher Hall in New York...

Southeastern Piano Festival

Deep in the heart of the Cold War, there was once a miracle in Moscow – Texas-based classical pianist Van Cliburn, of whom no one had heard, conquered at the First Tchaikovsky Competition, an event set aside to showcase Soviet talent. Cliburn was warned by his own government not to go, given the tense political relationship between the United States and Soviet Union at the time, and once he arrived he was greeted as a party crasher, subject to hostile stares and animosity of the kind he had never dreamed of back in Texas. And it was Cliburn, at the end, which brought down the house, and held the award. Back in America, he was greeted with a ticker tape parade and was the subject of a best-selling biography by Abram Chasins, The Van Cliburn Story, copies of which continue to clog the shelves of American thrift stores five decades hence. Ultimately, though, Cliburn's celebrity lost its luster. Nerves, ultra-picky perfectionism, and mishandling by management led to his early retirement from the concert scene; his greatest latter-day achievement being the force behind the Van Cliburn Piano Competition, America's most prestigious such event.

Recorded during live concert performances, Lang Lang's second Telarc release justifies all the positive buzz surrounding this young pianist's rapidly ascending international career. He brings plenty of finger power and long-lined drama to Rachmaninov's ubiquitous Third Concerto, yet takes plenty of time to let the lyrical, soaring tunes spin without an inkling of self-indulgence. He admirably adjusts the piano part to accompany when he doesn't bear the melodic burden, and he gets more expressive mileage from transitions than many pianists do. For once, the thicker, more difficult first movement cadenza doesn't sound unwieldy and elephantine. The piano is a little too prominent in the mix next to Temirkanov's sensitively detailed, flowing orchestral support. While Lang Lang has not fully internalized the quivering underbelly of Scriabin's passionate keyboard writing, his poised and secure readings of 10 Etudes still boast plenty of dynamism, idiomatic nuance, and roaring, Horowitz-like octaves. Watch this pianist!

Moscow-born pianist Boris Giltburg has made quite a name for himself in the big Russian piano classics. His Rachmaninoff Second was very fine and the vaunted “Rach 3” is no less impressive. He has the temperament and the technique for this mighty work and squares up to its scale and ambition with great panache. Conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto draws some high-powered yet elegant playing from the Scottish orchestra. The Corelli Variations of 1931, the composer’s last solo work, is an altogether cooler creation—less heart-on-sleeve but equally entrancing. Giltburg scales back and plays it with terrific confidence.