Win PE Sergei Strelec

French pianist Jonathan Fournelm, 27, has won this year’s Queen Elisabeth Piano Competition. Second Prize was awarded to Rusian pianist Sergei Redkin and third Prize to Keigo Mukawa (Japan).

This 10-CD set wowed audiences when it first appeared in 1992, and with good reason – although music scholars and classical record collectors were well aware of it, the general classical audience of the late twentieth century likely had no inkling of how extensively Rachmaninov had recorded and otherwise preserved aspects of his playing and performances (in addition to his actual recordings, there were also the piano rolls that he did for the American Piano Company, which are a matter separate from this collection, and transcribed and released by Decca/London Records on CD).

A selection of lucid, intimate, and short-from Rachmaninoff works, interpreted with pinpoint technical precision.

Sergei Leiferkus has a fine and distinctive baritone, but what makes him a truly exceptional singer is his formidable talent as an actor, and never has this been more persuasively captured on record than here. From his electrifying and chilling interpretation of Songs and Dances of Death, in which, as Death, he assumes four very different guises (vindictive, romantic, seductive and bellicose), to the bright, faux-naïf songs of The Nursery, where, with no sense of awkwardness, he affects an improbably high but convincingly childlike voice, rattling off the silly ‘ta-ta-ta-ta’s of ‘Hobby-Horse’ with aplomb, then slipping seamlessly into the familiar adult tone of the nanny or parent, he demonstrates daunting versatility.