Howard Shelley and Hilary Macnamara have here selected the finest of Rachmaninov's four-hand piano music, leaving the prospect of a second disc to consist of rather insubstantial leftovers. The point is academic, however, since their playing is so much less distinguished than that of Brigitte Engerer and Oleg Maisenberg on their two-disc Harmonia Mundi set (Thorson and Thurber on Paula/Gamut are not lightly to be dismissed, but the recorded sound does them scant justice).
Having admired large parts of Shelley's solo Rachmaninov recordings for Hyperion my disappointment with the new issue is all the stronger. I find it astonishing that he and his partner should choose to play the ''Barcarolle'' from the Op. 5 Suite as an energetic dance—this flies in the face of the markings and of the poem printed in the score, not to mention the title. They also turn the mournfulness of the third movement (''Tears'') into a mechanical dirge, miscalculating the accumulation of sound towards the climax so that it becomes impossibly bashy (for the same reason the Easter bells of the last movement suffer from clapper-fatigue). Throughout the recital there are passages where piano 1 fails to retreat sufficiently when thematic interest lies in the other instrument, at the same time as piano 2 tends to be under-powered.
Similarly, the Symphonic Dances are a long catalogue of tonal shortcomings—accents and colours failing to stand in proper relief, or paragraphs starting too loud and having nowhere to go, of climaxes given too much force and not enough weight, of singing lines lumpily phrased and not directed towards their expressive nerve-centre. Apart from suffering none of these drawbacks Engerer and Maisenberg show far more grasp of idiom, and their positioning face-to-face across the stereo image gives a far more transparent sound than the side-by-side placement of Shelley and Macnamara. Hyperion's recording is generally rather hissy and too close, but otherwise quite realistic. Artistic honours are more even in the Second Suite, but in terms of overall recommendation there is no contest.'