I first heard Nikolai Lugansky, a young prize-winning Russian pianist, last year when two Rachmaninov recital discs came my way (Vanguard Classics, 1/95). There I noted his “immense technical fluency” and “innate musical quality” while finding some of his playing “oddly detached”. The same qualities emerge in these fleet, exceptionally well-mannered performances of the Third and Fourth Concertos, set within Ivan Shpiller’s polite, even anodyne, partnership (try the one moment of orchestral glory, the introduction to the Third Concerto’s central “Intermezzo”) and Vanguard Classics’ gentle, soft-focus sound. Such an approach may be temporarily fashionable (recent discs by Andsnes and Thibaudet come to mind) but Rachmaninov’s regenerative glamour and urgency surely require at least as much recognition as his inherently aristocratic nature.
True, Lugansky’s tone is beautifully rounded and unforced in all parts of the dynamic spectrum (a truly Russian prerogative) and passages of delicate filigree are spun off with a no less enviable elegance and lightness. What I missed were altogether more audacious virtues. An aura of Mozartian delicacy hangs over both performances, and neither will make your pulse beat faster. In the Third Concerto few modern recordings come within hailing distance of Horowitz’s fire-eating aplomb (his early Coates disc from 1931), Gilels’s aristocratic ease and grandeur (from 1955) or Argerich’s pulverizing attack. In the Fourth Concerto the high flyers are Michelangeli and Ashkenazy (with either Previn or Haitink, both on Decca). Zoltan Kocsis’s performances (newly reissued) err excitingly on the wild side, with more than a touch of Hungarian spice. Lugansky, very sensibly, chooses the slimmer, more silvery of the two cadenzas in the Third Concerto, and his performance is blessedly uncut.'