Rachmaninov & Khachaturian: Piano Concertos
Alicia de Larrocha
Label
Decca
Catalogue No.
4820725
Barcode
00028948207251
Format
1-CD
About

Although Alicia de Larrocha was justly crowned in her own lifetime as the Queen of Spanish piano music, the larger-scale Romantic concertos were also within her repertoire during the first half of her long career until her finger-span could not accommodate the outsize hand-stretches required by Rachmaninov’s music in particular. To such works as Eloquence has reissued in a series devoted to her Decca recordings, Larrocha brought the same articulate clarity, palette of colours, rhythmic buoyancy and depth of expression that distinguished her recordings of Albéniz and Granados. As Raymond Tuttle remarks in the booklet-note appreciation of de Larrocha’s art, ‘these recordings, made during her glory days, remind us once again of her versatility and how completely she identifies with this music’.

Along with Brahms’s Second, the Third Concerto of Rachmaninov is the most arduous and demanding within the central repertoire both on account of sheer length and the torrents of notes with which the concerto’s passion is poured out. While fully in command of such passages as the famously taxing first-movement cadenza, however, Larrocha unerringly locates the more playful side of the concerto as well as giving the slow movement a performance of especial, limpid grace. In this she is aided by insightful accompaniment from the London Symphony Orchestra and André Previn who became prized as a Rachmaninov interpreter during the 1970s through celebrated accounts of the symphonies and the concertos (with Ashkenazy).

As the critic, Felix Aprahamian, once observed, ‘Alicia de Larrocha never puts a finger wrong’: true no less in the more unfamiliar territory of the concerto by Aram Khachaturian which enjoyed decades of popularity after its composition in 1936 before the composer’s Armenian-tinged, cinematically conceived, Romantic idiom fell out of fashion. At the climax of the impassioned slow movement, its sweeping melody is played on both piano and flexatone, a musical saw which produces unearthly glissandi, somewhat like an ondes martenot.

TRACK LISTING / ARTISTS

SERGEI RACHMANINOV
Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, Op. 30

London Symphony Orchestra
André Previn

ARAM KHACHATURIAN
Piano Concerto in D flat major

London Philharmonic Orchestra
Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos

Alicia de Larrocha, piano 

Recording information

Recording Producer: Michael Woolcock
Balance Engineers: Kenneth Wilkinson (Rachmaninov); James Lock, Colin Moorfoot (Khachaturian)
Recording Location: Kingsway Hall, London, UK, 3–4 October 1974 (Rachmaninov), 9, 10 & 12 May 1972 (Khachaturian)
Originally released on SXL 6746 (Rachmaninov); SXL 6599 (Khachaturian)
Remastering Engineer: Chris Bernauer

Reviews

The slow movement of the Piano Concerto as interpreted by a Spanish pianist and a Spanish conductor sounds evocatively like Falla and the finale is also infectiously jaunty.’ Penguin Guide, 1996 (Khachaturian)