If there is a caveat for this release, it’s that the hour-long playing time is not enough – a measure of just how good this Rachmaninov recital is. Sergei Babayan has chosen fifteen pieces – mostly from the Preludes and Etudes-tableaux, adding, as a novelty, Volodos’s transcription of the Cello Sonata’s slow movement (nice!). It can be taken for granted that Babayan has a transcendental technique, to which I can advise that he plays, as any one of these tasty morsels respectively requires, with power, passion, sensitivity, delicacy, mercurial dexterity and a flexible expressivity that drawers the listener in through a variety of idiomatic touches, colours and dynamics, faithfully recorded (in December 2009 says the booklet, surely a mistake?). DG 483 9181.
Sergei Babayan records Rachmaninov for Deutsche Grammophon.
I was heartened Col to read your sympathetic comments about this disc, having heard it myself only yesterday and been bowled over. Babayan’s playing is at once delicate (Morceau de fantasie in G minor, very Richter-like), rhythmically propulsive (Prelude Op. 32/6, echoes of Rachmaninov himself), and infused with a great sense of mystery, most particularly in the Etude-Tableau Op. 33/3, where beyond the desolate opening, the barcarolle-style writing seems to ferry us across calm but troubled waters to an isle of the dead (yes, the refence is intentional). And there’s the mournful B minor Prelude (Op.32/10), at once consoling and defiant, the one where Moiseiwitsch intuited Rachmaninov’s own private narrative, ‘The Return’. Here Babayan catches the music’s pathos but without overstating its powerful sense of rhetoric. You mention Volodos’s solo transcription of the Andante from the Cello Sonata. Interesting perhaps in this context to confess that my way of auditioning a cd such as this – where I’m not obliged to prepare a review – is to listen ‘blind’, and when the Andante arrived, such was Volodos’s expertise and the gorgeous contours of Bayaban’s performance, that I assumed I was listening to a posthumous prelude/study based on the same, or at least very similar, material. Also worth mentioning are the generous pauses for breath that DG leave between each track. A truly wonderful cd.
Thanks Rob for your complementary words and insights. Babayan’s Rachmaninov is indeed a great recording, which I am keeping within easy reach, for I know I shall be playing and enjoying it again soon and often. Col