Venerated by virtually all pianists, Rachmaninov was the first to make a substantial number of recordings. That he would have made many more were it not for the obtuseness of the record companies he was contracted to is well known. Rachmaninov recorded for Thomas Edison, who – rumour had it – was deaf, and who objected to Rachmaninov’s playing, mistaking his formidable mastery for ‘pounding’. A request for further recordings was turned down. Later, Rachmaninov offered to record, among other things, Beethoven’s First Concerto and Waldstein Sonata, and Liszt’s B minor Sonata, but these were rejected by a ‘suggestions committee’. And so while we are forever grateful for what exists, what is missing remains inestimable.

Just possibly, attitudes to Rachmaninov the pianist could easily have been influenced by those to Rachmaninov the composer, maligned for many years by all and sundry. Even his compatriot Rimsky-Korsakov was unappreciative (‘forgive me, but I do not find this music at all agreeable’), while Copland later claimed that ‘the prospect of having to sit through one of his extended symphonies or piano concertos, tends, quite frankly, to depress me. All those notes, and to what end?’ Eric Blom, writing in the 1954 edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music & Musicians, notoriously dismissed Rachmaninov’s music as ‘monotonous in texture, [consisting] in essence mainly of artificial and gushing tunes’, predicting that his popular success would not last. The response from Vladimir Ashkenazy was swift and acidic, with an enquiry as to when there would be a new edition of Grove. New York’s Harold Schonberg, too, took ferocious issue: ‘it is one of the most outrageously snobbish and even stupid statements ever to be found in a work that is supposed to be an objective reference’. Such estimates may seem absurd in hindsight but they contributed to the morbid image of a composer understandably subject to chronic depression and anxiety. Leaving Russia as the Revolution took hold left Rachmaninov traumatised: ‘I left behind my desire to compose: losing my country, I lost myself also.’

Such biographical considerations and critical assessments of Rachmaninov’s music need stressing because they ran counter to the sense of awe inspired by his pianism. Stravinsky may have famously described Rachmaninov as ‘a six-and-a-half-foot scowl’ but he had no reservations when it came to his piano-playing. For Josef Hofmann, the dedicatee of the Third Concerto (which, intriguingly, he never performed), he was ‘made of steel and gold; steel in his arms, gold in his heart. I can never think of this majestic being without tears in my eyes, for I not only admired him as a supreme artist, but I also loved him as a man.’ For Arthur Rubinstein, ‘he had the secret of the golden, living tone which comes from the heart … I was always under the spell of his glorious and inimitable tone which could make me forget my uneasiness about his too rapidly fleeting fingers and his exaggerated rubatos. There was always the irresistible sensuous charm, not unlike Kreisler’s.’ Stephen Kovacevich also holds Rachmaninov’s pianism in the highest regard: ‘There is no disputing that Rachmaninov is the king. Even if you dislike it, he’s still the king. There’s nobody like him.’ This suggestion of an unarguable and imperious authority is complemented by his reference to Rachmaninov’s recording of Schubert’s Impromptu in A flat, D899 No 4. You may question an oddly curt and testy start, but you will surely be lost in wonder in the central section; for Kovacevich, ‘this is not interpreting … this is becoming; it’s devastating’. Mikhail Pletnev, too, sings from the same sheet. ‘Rachmaninov is beyond easy definition,’ he said in an interview many years ago. ‘Think of it like this. Horowitz was a pianist. This tells you about Horowitz. But it is not enough to say Rachmaninov was a pianist. For me, he was music.’ Pletnev was acutely conscious of playing that derived from the unique breadth of Rachmaninov’s scope and range, his transcendental gifts as composer, pianist and conductor. Such richness and inclusiveness make a chapter heading ‘the Puritan’ suggest limitation rather than plenty. True, Rachmaninov could be austere, but he could also be caressing and warm-hearted. Listen to his recordings of his transcription of his songs ‘Lilacs’ and ‘Daisies’ and you will hear playing in which emotion is expressed in a gloriously full cantabile. He told both Gina Bachauer and Ruth Slenczynska that, in common with Chopin, everything must sing.

Rare dissent came from Claudio Arrau, who, despite his reputation as a diplomat, could be far from diplomatic: ‘His playing (he sought desperately for the right word) was disgusting.’ Arrau was even known to shake his fist at a luckless interviewer who had the temerity to mention Rachmaninov’s name in his presence. Artur Schnabel’s bitterness at Rachmaninov’s immense success as a pianist stemmed from his sense that here was a musician addicted to entertainment rather than depth. Despising what he saw as a superficial repertoire including frothy encores, he once commented sardonically that he was the only pianist who plays a second half of a programme as boring as the first. To mention Rachmaninov when talking to Alfred Brendel is similarly ill-advised. Reservation also came from an altogether more surprising direction. Horowitz may have viewed Rachmaninov as a close friend but he was critical of the composer’s performance of his Third Concerto (significantly Horowitz’s own trump card and one, after some early reservations, celebrated by the composer in no uncertain terms – ‘This is the way I always dreamed my concerto should be played, but I never expected to hear it that way on earth’). Horowitz’s failure to keep his promise to play the First Concerto may well have come from a fear of comparison with the composer’s own inimitable recording.

Again, it is difficult not to think of Rachmaninov’s recordings as an Aladdin’s cave of awe-inspiring surprises. His immense technique (he was not above practising Hanon, and also Paul de Schlözer’s Étude in A flat, Op 1 No 2, later made famous in Eileen Joyce’s early recording) was uniquely inclusive in terms of grandeur and sonority and, as Boris Berezovsky once put it, in its sense of polyphony, of an intricate sense of voicing and texture. There was, perhaps above all else, a powerful sense of direction, of music heading towards a culminating point, of mosaics that led to that crucial moment in the structure of the work (an idea he had inherited from Chaliapin, the great singer and Rachmaninov’s friend). Who else has driven the Scherzo from Chopin’s Second Piano Sonata forwards with such demonic rhythmic propulsion, with such a sense of destination? Or dared to take liberties in the same work’s Funeral March, or ignored Chopin’s sotto voce marking in the finale? (Rachmaninov’s volatile and sinister whirl in the latter was later emulated by Cziffra and Katsaris, to take two examples.) Even if you don’t always agree with the approach and question whether it’s truly idiomatic, the musical strength and authority are unwavering.

Aside from the Second Piano Sonata, Rachmaninov’s Chopin on record consists of a selection of waltzes, mazurkas and nocturnes with additional large-scale offerings of the Third Ballade and Third Scherzo. His D flat major Waltz, Op 64 No 1, is too alive with poetry and fantasy to allow for facile comments about minutes, and in its A flat major companion, Op 64 No 3, his music-making transforms a virtually strict tempo into a pattering and magical delicacy.

In his own music a tendency to hurry may have been dictated by the primitive format of the times, but there is also an occasional suggestion of diffidence, almost as if the composer had become distanced from his own creations. But what exceptions in the ebb and flow of the G sharp minor Prelude or in the Polka de WR, where his playing, for all its engaging wit, does not extend to, say, Cherkassky’s mischievous charm or an idiosyncrasy close to the point of caricature – a quality alien to Rachmaninov’s style. In his concertos he is lean and muscular, and in the once maligned No 4 (today, many pianists’ favourite) there is not an ounce of fat, in musical or physical terms. Here, all of his razor-sharp rhythm and explosive energy pulse to recreate a sardonic masterpiece, more a baleful glance at new musical directions in Russia (exemplified by, say, Prokofiev’s Toccata and Suggestion diabolique) than an attempt to move with the times. The opening of the Second Concerto gives us one of those unforgettable moments as, from Rachmaninov, it swings to and fro like a giant pendulum in an ever-widening and precisely judged arc. I think he would have been surprised and provoked at the tempos of modern pianists, whether brisk to the point of superficiality from Stephen Hough or slow to the point of absurdity from Lang Lang. He would, I think, have been much happier with Richter’s slow yet cumulative movement in that same opening.

Among the many treasures within those all-too-few recordings is a tightly coiled performance of Liszt’s E major Polonaise (the reverse of Percy Grainger’s eccentric and flaccid alternative). Yet if I was to single out one performance above all others it would have to be the composer’s own First Concerto, recorded with Rachmaninov’s long-term partners, the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy. Here is playing of a clarity and verve beyond compare. Such a performance makes Rachmaninov the composer and Rachmaninov the pianist an inseparable entity (he always claimed he thought as a composer rather than as a pianist), the nobility and aristocracy of one reflected in the other.

Finally, I have the words of my own one-time teacher in America, Bomar Cramer, still ringing in my ears. ‘You speak of Horowitz, but Rachmaninov was both a greater pianist and musician. His sound was like bronze; he was, simply, incomparable.’ 

This article originally appeared in the June 2023 issue of International Piano. Never miss an issue – subscribe today