For her many fans, the young Ukrainian pianist Anna Fedorova is a champion of Rachmaninov, and her performance of his Second Piano Concerto alone has garnered over 38 million views on YouTube. Although this statistic might suggest that she is some kind of pop-classic performer, she is quite the opposite, with a serious and searching attitude to the music, never content just to skim the surface, and steering clear of mere flashy virtuosity. She clearly strives to add her own personal touches to this over-played and over-recorded piece. With her new recording of the Third, she has now completed her set of the complete Rachmaninov concertos for Channel Classics – naturally, she left the greatest challenge to the end.

As with her interpretation of the Second, there are plenty of personal touches in her Third: she delivers many passages in a playful or even whimsical spirit, uses rubato freely and generously, and finds opportunities for unusual phrasing and accentuation, all supported with sensitivity and precision by Modestas Pitrėnas conducting the St Gallen Symphony Orchestra. This approach gives us a succession of golden moments, but these do not add up to a coherent and compelling account of the whole. Rachmaninov, admittedly, tempts the soloist with a characteristic abundance of ideas, but other pianists have found an overarching logic to the piece. Even at the climax of the finale (starting at 14'28"), which can be powerfully propulsive, Fedorova is in danger of grinding to a halt. The liberties she takes in her rendition of slower episodes seems to be at odds with her strict, regimented approach in faster passages, as if two different interpretations are competing with each other. The sound on the discs does not help matters: it seems rather monochrome and ‘domestic’, which undermines any sense of heroism and grandeur that we would expect of this concerto.

In Rachmaninov’s rarely performed ‘Youth Symphony’ (a single allegro movement written when he was 18), Pitrėnas prioritises clarity over drive, which may not be the best way to convince sceptical listeners that this dramatic, Tchaikovskian piece is a worthwhile addition to the repertoire. There is a solo piano encore, The Messenger by Valentin Silvestrov, which ends the album on a ruminative and poignant note, reminding us that it was made in a time of war.