Search - Thomas Muntzer, Sergey Rachmaninov, Alexander Scriabin :: Constantin Lifschitz Plays Rachmaninoff & Scriabin

Refinement and poise

Michael Whincop | GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY, QLD AUSTRALIA | 10/09/2000

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Young Constantin Lifschitz made a live recording which featured a selection of the Rakhmaninov op. 32 preludes. In this excellent recording, he returns to give us the whole opus. Like that earlier recording, he shows a natural affinity for the composer. The trick to performing Rakhmaninov is to capture the graceful legato phrasing required in the ecstatic lyricism of this music, while maintaining the full sense of its polyphonic qualities -- all the while contending with its cruel technical demands. Not many people manage it -- the composer, of course, Richter in his version of the First and Second Concertos, and his later recordings of a selection of preludes and etudes, Sofronitsky in his limited recordings of the works, and Sergio Fiorentino. Lifschitz is worthy of this company. His technique is flawless, and he balances beautifully the demands I mentioned above, with a seemingly endless array of tonal colour. Even in the heftier pieces here, like nos 1 and 6, he never bangs the piano, and he conjures that Russian sense of infinite spaciousness in nos 10 and 13. I do not think there is a better set of the op. 32 on disk.Besides the preludes, you also get the Scriabin 5th and a few of his miniatures. Scriabin I can take or leave, but Lifschitz is thoroughly inside the idiom. He's doesn't quite produce the hysterical vertigo that you hear in Horowitz, or the hyperintensity of Richter -- in fact, he's more reminiscent of Fiorentino, using his huge compass of colour and his fine sense of rubato to produce the necessary Scriabinesque sense of dislocation."