Rachmaninov Rarities
Pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy has given us some amazing music over the years. What comes to my mind today is actually not this CD, but his performances with violinist Yitzhak Perlman in the three Brahms sonatas. That’s an old recording, and I still listen to it several times a week on my ipod.
This recording, however, is new, and features the following music by Rachmaninov that shows us great diversity:
Piano Piece in A flat major
Morceaux de Salon, Op. 10
Three Nocturnes
Song without words
Canon in E minor
Fuga in D minor (1891)
Four Pieces (?1888)
Prelude in F major
Morceau de fantaisie ‘Delmo’ in G minor (1899)
Fughetta in F (1899)
Oriental Sketch (1917)
Night is sorrowful, Op. 26 No.12
Nunc Dimittis
Performed by Vladimir Ashkenazy (piano)
Legendary Russian pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy is considered one of the great interpreters of Rachmaninov’s music; and as he marked his seventy-fifth birthday (6 July 2012), he recorded a final album of the composer’s music featuring the Seven Pieces (Moments Musicaux) Op.10, three Nocturnes, and ten shorter early works, including an unpublished ‘Song without Words’.
Here is Pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy, as he talks about and plays Rachmaninov’s Variations on a Theme of Corelli.
And here’s an older video of the young Itzhak Perlman and Vladimir Ashkenazy rehearsing and discussing Cesar Franck’s Violin Sonata in A major at the Decca Studios in London, 1968.
Tags: Vladimir Ashkenazy, Rachmaninov, Rarities