RACHMANINOV Piano Concertos Nos 2 & 3

Record and Artist Details

Composer or Director: Sergey Rachmaninov

Genre:

Orchestral

Label: Deutsche Grammophon

Media Format: CD or Download

Media Runtime: 71

Mastering:

DDD

Catalogue Number: 479 1304

479 1304. RACHMANINOV Piano Concertos Nos 2 & 3. Yuja Wang

Tracks:

Composition Artist Credit
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 3 Sergey Rachmaninov, Composer
(Simón) Bolívar Symphony Orchestra, Venezuela
Gustavo Dudamel, Conductor
Sergey Rachmaninov, Composer
Yuja Wang, Piano
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 2 Sergey Rachmaninov, Composer
(Simón) Bolívar Symphony Orchestra, Venezuela
Gustavo Dudamel, Conductor
Sergey Rachmaninov, Composer
Yuja Wang, Piano
‘The most dazzlingly, uncannily gifted pianist in the concert world today joins forces with “magician-maestro” Gustavo Dudamel,’ trumpet the critics, and for once there is more than an element of truth in such a lavish assertion. With recordings of the Liszt Sonata and Brahms’s Paganini Variations behind her (8/09, 7/10), Yuja Wang now plays live in a single concert two of the most ferociously demanding of all piano concertos, a feat only previously achieved in my experience by Ashkenazy. Making her virtuoso credentials clear throughout, Wang dismisses every difficulty with nonchalant ease; hear her in the skittering waltz variation in the central Intermezzo of the Rachmaninov or in the scintillating a tempo come prima outburst in the finale. When Rachmaninov claimed sardonically that he wrote his concerto for elephants and asked himself why he wrote something so difficult, he reckoned without Wang’s astonishing facility.

She is no less powerful and quicksilver in the Prokofiev, where Rachmaninov’s romanticism is taken into an altogether darker and more menacing place, and it is only on reflection that the Rachmaninov seems less memorable than from, say, Horowitz, Gilels or Cliburn, where slower tempi allow for a greater sense of breadth, expansiveness and heroics. But make no mistake, this is a talent with a vengeance, the youthful partnership with Dudamel is ideal and both performances, recorded in Caracas, are understandably greeted with storms of applause.

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