Piano Transcriptions
Although he has recorded almost all of Rachmaninov's music, Vladimir Ashkenazy is not a pianist one would expect to be attracted to the composer's transcriptions--or to play them as well as he does on this disc. Ashkenazy has a deserved reputation for sobriety, seriousness, and faithfulness to the composer's texts. These qualities do not usually accord with a taste for transcriptions, which celebrate the resources of the piano and the legerdemain of the virtuoso. But time seems to have softened Ashkenazy's puritanism. It's hard to think of anyone--save the composer himself--who has ever played so many of these transcriptions so well. In Rachmaninov's arrangement of the Scherzo from Mendelssohn'sA Midsummer Night's Dream, Ashkenazy attacks the famously difficult passages--with their crossed hands, thick chords, and awkwardly positioned repeated notes--and achieves results superior to those of pianists who are considered specialists in this kind of literature. The energy, delicacy, and transparency of his interpretation make Bolet's sound labored and Wild's heavy-handed. Ashkenazy's approach to these pieces resembles Rachmaninov's: lean, swift, and unsentimental. His performance of the transcription of Tchaikovsky's song "Lullaby," for example, moves at a dry-eyed pace and with a disciplined rhythm similar to that heard on the composer's own recording. But unsentimental does not mean lack of feeling. In this piece, and elsewhere on the disc, Ashkenazy surpasses his peers in capturing Rachmaninov's poignancy and passion, as well as his nostalgia for the Russia he would never see again.--Stephen Wigler