Rachmaninoff seconds

Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto is a gorgeous piece, less demanding of the non-expert listener than, say, the Brahms First, and posing considerable technical challenges for the pianist (though fewer, I've been led to believe, than Rachmaninoff's Third Concerto).  It often seems to be a piece that young pianists at the beginnings of their careers, cut their teeth on in the recording studio.  It's clearly enough of an achievement to play the thing well to get the record companies' publicity machines to crank into high gear and proclaim the arrival of the next young lion (or lioness) of the keyboard.  If they can get their pianist on the cover of something like Gramophone, so much the better.  In this age of being able to acquire lots of well-recorded performances of music very cheaply -- through budget reissues and purchase of used CDs -- you can buy as many Rachmaninoff Seconds as you want and not come close to bankrupting yourself.  Recently, I bought three for a total of about $9.00, all in digital sound from the 1980's -- a Sony recording (originally CBS) of Cecile Licad with Abbado and the Chicago Symphony; an EMI (now Warner) of Andrei Gavrilov with Muti and the Philadelphia Orchestra; and a Decca recording by Christina Ortiz, with Moshe Atzmon and the Royal Philharmonic.  All are studio recordings, and I checked them in my listening against Stephen Hough's more recent live recording with Andrew Litton and the Dallas Symphony, on Hyperion.  I really like Hough's account -- it is excitingly paced without ever seeming rushed, and the recording captures amazingly well the varied colors of Hough's playing.  It's not just a wash of gorgeous sound; it's alive minute by minute, and very fresh.  When Hough recorded it in 2004 he was already a well-known "star" pianist.  Of the pianists in the recordings mentioned above, two were just setting out -- Ortiz (from Brazil) and Licad (from the Philippines) -- while Gavrilov had about a decade of recording under his belt.  All three had won prestigious competitions.

I had two surprises in listening to this trio of recordings.  First, I was disappointed in the Licad/Abbado recording, and that was a surprise because I very much like a Saint-Saens Second that Licad made with Previn around the same time. My disappointment was with the sound first and foremost: the orchestral sound was thick and its relation to the piano was murky.  With the piano itself, the sound seemed bass-heavy.  The overall effect was leaden -- not what one usually gets with Abbado.  I was reminded that I didn't like the sound of his Sony Tchaikovsky recordings from Chicago (although Deutsche Grammophon  got good results with him there, especially in Mahler).  The Gavrilov/Muti recording was a pleasure -- nothing fancy, just nice sound and good balance, reminding me other recordings I had enjoyed, like Vasary's and Guttierez's (on DG and Telarc respectively).  The pleasant surprise, though, was the Ortiz/Atzmon recording, with a lot of air round the sound and an almost chamber-music-like intimacy between orchestra and soloist.  It's a very lyrical recording, with no highlighting of the virtuosity and paced more relaxedly than Hough's.  It's not slack, though, and the sound is very inviting.  Adding to its charms are the unusual pairings.  Gavrilov and Licad feature the Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini -- almost a default pairing for this concerto, and, of course, it's a lovely piece.  Still, it was nice to hear Ortiz work through Addinsell's so-called "Warsaw" concerto (film-music very much in the Rachmaninoff vein) and Litolff's Scherzo.  The most unusual feature was her rendering of an arrangement of Gottschalk's variations on the Brazilian national anthem, obviously an oblique tribute to Ortiz's own heritage.  The pairings are pretty lightweight, but no less charming for all that.