Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Complete Picture From RCA

Sergei Rachmaninoff has been victimized by his own popularity and accessibility as a composer, although only a small part of his considerable output has received wide exposure. His C-minor Piano Concerto (No. 2), with its “brazenly expressed sweetness,” as Artur Rubinstein grudgingly put it, is the most exploited of classical compositions--or was until the recent commercial manifestations of “Ode to Joy”-ousness and Mozartmania--and is the source for no fewer than four pop songs.

The C-minor Concerto has paid for its popularity by being banished to pops concerts by critics and presenters who take themselves and their audiences a tad too seriously. Interestingly, the D-minor Piano Concerto (No. 3), the Second Symphony, “The Isle of the Dead” and even the “Paganini” Rhapsody are not treated with comparable contempt.

A mammoth set (RCA Victor Gold Seal 61265, 10 CDs, mid-price) restores to circulation all the recordings Rachmaninoff made for RCA as pianist and, occasionally, conductor, leading “Isle” and the Third Symphony.

The superb digital transfers are from originals made between 1919 to 1942, a year before Rachmaninoff’s death, at age 70, in Beverly Hills.

Of primary interest may be his interpretations of his own music, which are extraordinarily free with the letter(s) of the scores, further evidence that composers are the least dogmatic interpreters of their own creations.

What matters more is that Rachmaninoff was such a complete pianist, equipped with sovereign technique, rhythmic acuity and the firmest architectural grasp, a range of sound that defies description (listen, listen) in whatever he chose to play and record during his spectacularly successful career as a traveling virtuoso.

Included are two different recordings of the C-minor Concerto, from 1924 and 1929, both with Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra as almost uncannily sympathetic collaborators (Oh, those string portamentos!).

The dissimilarities between the two readings, either of which could be taken as the last word on the subject, are considerable, not least for the quality of recorded sound which in the earlier version reduces the orchestra, not unappealingly, to chamber proportions.

What the two have in common--and this applies equally to the “Paganini” Rhapsody and the other three piano concertos, all of which are included--is the intense concentration the pianist brought to everything he touched.

And while one has to remark on the rhythmic freedom of his playing, whether in his own music, or that of Beethoven (the G-major Sonata, Opus 30, No. 3), Schumann (“Carnaval”), Chopin (the B-flat-minor Sonata) or Liszt, he always stopped well short of the self-aggrandizing, taffy-pulling display characteristic of some of his colleagues of the putative pianistic Golden Age.

Rachmaninoff’s interpretive subjectivity grows for the most part out of the music. His playing breathes, it has backbone and mobility--nowhere more so than in the fast, flickering 1940 recording of his D-minor Piano Concerto and the craggy products (1928) of his memorable partnership with violinist Fritz Kreisler in duo-sonatas by Beethoven, Schubert and Grieg.

In the RCA set Rachmaninoff plays, and grandly, several of his “Etudes Tableaux” for solo piano: subtle works of great harmonic daring written between 1911 and 1917. The new recording of all 17 of them by Turkish-born Idil Biret is a rewarding, even invaluable supplement.

Biret, a pianist of prodigious power and intelligence, brings a fierce rhythmic drive and, when needed, percussive edge to music that more than anything else by the composer shows him as a major contributor to 20th-Century piano technique.

The disc is another super-budget winner (retailing around $5) on the Naxos label (550347), admirable for both quality of performance and natural, incisive piano reproduction.

No component of Rachmaninoff’s output is less frequently encountered than his vocal music, which includes the hourlong a cappella “Vespers,” written in 1915 for Orthodox worship: a seamless integration of Russian Orthodox chant, arranged by Rachmaninoff, and original music by the composer.

Its exotic modalities and hypnotic calmness are projected in a knockout new recording (Chant du Monde 288 050) by the Saint Petersburg Capella, with its ethereal sopranos and sepulchral basses, under Vladislav Chernushenko’s inspiring direction.