Rachmaninov spent much of his life running from his own music. Not literally, of course — he played it constantly, on stages from Moscow to Madison Square Garden — but he circled it with a kind of suspicious unease, like a man who has left something valuable in a room he’d rather not enter. The letters tell the story. Writing to Nikolai Medtner in December of 1931, he confessed that he’d played the Corelli Variations perhaps fifteen times and found only one reading satisfactory. The rest, he said, were sloppy. He skipped variations based on how much the audience was coughing. In one small town, he played only ten of the twenty.
So what might he have made of Zlata Chochieva?
She’s a pianist’s pianist in the best sense — not a careerist of the repertoire, not someone packaging herself for algorithm-friendly playlists, but a player who has clearly spent serious time inside this music. Stephen Kovacevich, not a man given to easy enthusiasm, has said he’d be interested to hear anything she does. Pascal Devoyon concurs. Both of them are right.
The Chopin Variations — op. 22, composed between 1900 and 1902 as Rachmaninov was clawing his way back from the catastrophic failure of the First Symphony — are among the most underplayed major works in the piano literature. Underplayed on stage and underrepresented on disc, partly because they’re genuinely brutal, and partly because Rachmaninov himself designated four of them (Variations VII, IX, and XII, plus the coda) as optional, which gave nervous programmers an excuse to trim. Chochieva plays every last one of them. Good.
The theme itself — the C minor Prelude from Chopin’s op. 28, funeral-march solemn, harmonically stark — gives Rachmaninov a kind of permission to be dark. And he takes it. What’s remarkable about the set is how Rachmaninov doesn’t merely ornament or decorate; he metabolizes the theme, runs it through his own bloodstream, so that by the time you reach the variations in the major — the ones with the long, arching cantabile lines that could only have come from someone who had also written the Second Concerto — you’ve almost forgotten where you started. Chochieva understands this arc. Her voicing in the lyrical variations is exceptional: she brings out inner lines without making them feel excavated, and her tone in the upper register has a singing quality that never tips into sweetness. The fortissimos are massive without being brutal — the kind of power that comes from weight, not hammering.
The Sonata in d minor, op. 28 — composed in 1907, the same year as the Second Symphony — is the harder sell, and Rachmaninov knew it. He called it too long, too difficult, and of dubious musical value. One might ask why he wrote it. One might also ask why he never revised it, as he apparently intended to do. Maybe, like Vaughan Williams shrugging about his Fourth Symphony, he recognized that whatever he thought of it, it was what he meant.
It is long. Running past half an hour in most performances, it sprawls in ways the tighter-knit Second Sonata never does. But sprawl isn’t the same as failure. The first movement has a thematic density that rewards close listening — three subjects, elaborately developed, with the kind of contrapuntal ambition that suggests Rachmaninov was reading Bach seriously, which he was. The slow movement is the emotional center of the piece, and here Chochieva is at her finest: patient, unhurried, allowing the harmonies to breathe. Too many pianists rush this movement as if apologizing for the sonata’s length; she doesn’t apologize for anything.
The finale’s perpetual-motion momentum is the kind of thing that separates the technically equipped from the technically formidable. Chochieva is the latter. Her articulation stays clean even at speed, the left hand never muddying what the right is doing, and she finds a natural ebb and flow in the dynamics that keeps the movement from sounding like an endurance event — which, in lesser hands, it absolutely does.
Compared to the handful of committed recordings of these works — Marc-André Hamelin’s typically brilliant op. 22, or Howard Shelley’s thoughtful survey — Chochieva holds her own with real distinction. She brings something warmer than Hamelin’s crystalline precision, something more urgent than Shelley’s measured approach. This is Rachmaninov played from the inside.
Rachmaninov would probably still have found something to complain about. That was his way. But he would have been listening.
