Rachmaninov Piano Concertos – Lisitsa

YouTube fame is a strange gateway into the recording studio, and Valentina Lisitsa’s route there — millions of views, a career resurrected by webcam rather than by the usual grind of competitions and management offices — makes her something of a test case. Does the digital-age audience know something the old apparatus of classical music missed? Or does virality simply reward a certain kind of pianistic glamour, the sort that photographs well in close-up?

Having now sat with her Rachmaninov cycle for the better part of a week, I find myself answering: some of both.

The Second Concerto is where she’s most comfortable, and it shows. The great tune in the first movement’s second subject unfolds without any of the swooning rubato that afflicts lesser accounts. She trusts the melody, lets it breathe on its own long line rather than pulling at it the way, say, Van Cliburn habitually did in his most syrupy moments. Her tone in the slow movement has a silvery quality, cool at the center, that suits Rachmaninov’s harmonic ambiguities rather better than the plush, cushioned sound so many pianists reach for here. One thinks of Ashkenazy’s own remake with Previn, gorgeous but sometimes cloying. Michael Francis and the LSO give her a responsive, alert partnership; the horn playing in the slow movement has real bloom to it, and the strings don’t wallow.

The First Concerto, youthful, brash, harmonically indebted to Grieg and to Tchaikovsky’s own concerto in the same key, comes off less convincingly. Lisitsa’s fingers are more than equal to its considerable difficulties, but there’s a foursquare quality to her phrasing in the outer movements that flattens some of the music’s adolescent impetuosity. Compare Sudbin’s BIS account, mentioned by more than one critic as a benchmark: he finds a wit and lightness in this score that Lisitsa, for all her technical address, doesn’t quite locate. Hers is a First Concerto played by someone already thinking about the Third.

And the Third is where the set really earns its keep, or very nearly does. This is a killer of a piece. Horowitz owned it for decades, and pianists have been living in his shadow, and in the shadow of Byron Janis, and later Argerich’s incendiary Berlin performance under Chailly, ever since. Lisitsa doesn’t attempt the Horowitz cadenza; she plays the shorter, “ossia” version, which some will count against her, though I’ve never quite understood the fetishization of difficulty for its own sake. What she does offer is clarity: every strand of the contrapuntal writing in the development section audible, nothing smudged by pedal. And a genuine sense of architecture across nearly forty minutes. The finale has real thrust, though I missed some of the unhinged abandon that Martha Argerich, or for that matter Van Cliburn in his 1958 Moscow rendition, bring to the coda.

Fourth Concerto: a problem child in the discography generally, and it remains one here. Rachmaninov himself never quite solved this score. He kept revising it, trimming it, apologizing for it almost, and it wants a pianist willing to embrace its oddness, its jazzy false starts, the way Michelangeli famously did in his classic EMI recording, finding poetry in passages that can otherwise sound merely eccentric. Lisitsa plays it well but a little literally. The slow movement, with its curious harmonic wandering, needs more mystery than she supplies.

The Paganini Rhapsody closes the set, and here the pianism is dazzling in the truest sense. The passagework in the variations leading up to the eighteenth has real sparkle, fingers like raindrops on a window. The famous eighteenth variation itself, that shameless upending of Paganini’s theme into pure Rachmaninov sentiment, is shaped with real feeling, though she resists milking it, which I respected more on second hearing than first.

Sonically, the engineering favors the piano heavily. This is a disc made for headphones and close listening, not for a sense of orchestral perspective, and there are moments, particularly in tuttis, where the LSO recedes further than seems ideal.

Where does this leave the set relative to the field? Not quite in the company of Andsnes/Pappano or the classic Ashkenazy/Previn cycle, both of which offer more consistent insight across all five scores. But better than the reflexive skepticism about her internet origins might suggest. There is real intelligence in the Second and Third Concertos particularly, and pianism throughout that is never less than accomplished, often more. A mixed verdict, but not a dismissive one. Worth hearing, especially if the price is right and your shelf doesn’t already groan under complete cycles.