This, the third and final instalment in Decca’s Thibaudet/Ashkenazy Rachmaninov concerto cycle (previous issues were reviewed in 12/94 and 10/95), proves to be, like the others in the series, a mixed blessing. The Cleveland Orchestra sing their hearts out beneath the piano’s tracery in the first movement’s closing tranquillo and it is good to hear so much normally submerged orchestral texture and detail. The take-offs in both the Allegro vivaces are exceptionally brisk, very much in keeping with a soloist who prefers nonchalance and nimbleness to more overt rhetorical pleading. Indeed, Thibaudet’s performance is among the fleetest on record, and relishes a taut and lean utterance far removed from the concerto’s more luxuriant, freewheeling predecessors.
Alas, there is a price to pay for such undoubted prowess. More vivacious than darkly expressive, Thibaudet’s sonority is recognizably Gallic with too little richness, variety and colour. Not even his most ardent admirers could claim he is a ‘big’ player and the sort of qualities that can serve him impeccably in, say, Ravel are hardly beneficial in Rachmaninov. This is damagingly true of his solo items. Significantly, he chooses the drastically shorn 1931 revision of the 1913 Second Sonata, its vital sequences and fullness jettisoned by Rachmaninov with characteristic insecurity. The result, particularly when offered with a certain glibness, is oddly piecemeal and unsatisfactory and there is no competition here for Howard Shelley’s audaciously urbane and tonally suave account, nor for the awe-inspiring brilliance of Horowitz, Ashkenazy and, most of all, Van Cliburn, heard live from Moscow and caught in the first flush of his unforgettable triumph (RCA – currently, sadly, unavailable). Thibaudet’s sprint through the C sharp minor Prelude’s central agitato is surely the reverse of a true commitment to that dark intensity at the very heart of Russian romanticism, and in the Corelli Variations his light, spare pedalling, musical hygiene and economy are a far cry from Ashkenazy’s poetry (whether you hear him as a youthful and ardent genius on Testament or as a more mature artist on Decca).
In the concerto Michelangeli continues cruelly to defy all comparisons, though Ashkenazy and Haitink make a very special case for this once much maligned masterpiece.'