Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No.1 in F# minor (Janis, Nebolsin)

Описание: “I have rewritten my First Concerto; it is really good now. All the youthful freshness is there, and yet it plays itself so much more easily. And nobody pays any attention.”

Rachmaninoff’s first concerto is his “everything” work – it was written in 1891, but extensively revised 26 years later in 1917, after the 2nd and 3rd concertos. The result is a lean, delicious thing that contains features of Rachmaninoff’s evolving idiom from all stages of his life. It retains, in parts, its original thematic directness, a feature that also defines the 2nd Concerto. Like the 3rd, it features a huge (to the point of grotesque) cadenza and a lot of textural contrast between the solo and orchestral part. And (particularly in the last movement), it contains a harmonic/metric pungency and orchestral fizziness that could come to define both the 4th Concerto and the Paganini Rhapsody (the closing bars of this work feature a reference to the Dies Irae that eerily anticipates the same gesture, in practically the same place, in the Rhapsody).

The music material here is treated with surprising efficiency and rigor. You have a repeated-note motif unifying the first and last movements; in the first movement, two primary themes linked by a common melodic shape; and in the middle section of the last movement, a lyrical theme in the orchestra accompanied by its diminuted self in the piano. And in very typical late(ish) Rachmaninoff style, this rigor is accompanied by phenomenally variegated orchestration – the woodwinds in particular play a starring role in many of the textures (16:41!) – and a preference for winding things up quickly in an burst of exuberant colour, rather than some big peroration (Rachmaninoff removed the original and relatively straightforward finale he wrote, which brings back Mvt 3’s lyrical theme, in favour of something much allusive and new-sounding).

Janis
00:00 – Mvt 1
12:14 – Mvt 2
17:56 – Mvt 3

Nebolsin
25:26 – Mvt 1
38:00 – Mvt 2
44:05 – Mvt 3*

Two spectacular performances. Janis is fleet and fierce; the sheer energy he brings to the piano part is, even today, basically unrivalled in the recorded catalogue. What’s amazing is that the orchestra (Reiner/CSO) manages to match this; the detailing in the woodwinds and brass is pure sonic pleasure. In case there were any doubt, Janis is also fantastic in the quiet passages: the pp moments in the 2nd and 3rd moments are as expressive as anything you’ll hear. (That piano passage at 16:55 being shadowed in the very next bar -- exquisite stuff.)

Nebolsin is huge, steely, but avoids the Russian-piano-school trap of subjugating texture and articulation in favour of mass of sound (looking at you, Matsuev/Sokolov). In fact, this is probably one of the most precisely articulated and rhythmically taut accounts of a Rachmaninoff concerto on record, even as the playing reaches some ferocious heights of dynamic intensity (that apocalyptic cadenza: 36:49. Thing’s aren’t as quicksilver as with Janis, but the dynamic/textural control you get makes the tradeoff more than worth it.