I was going to spend this month writing about, among other things, composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, who was born on April 1, 1873. Then I did the math and realized that a whole month-long focus on Rachmaninoff might be a better idea for next year, Rachmaninoff’s sesquicentennial.
Meantime, I can’t let this great composer’s birth date go unmentioned, so here’s a wonderful performance of his Piano Concerto #2 in C minor, performed by Khatia Buniatishvili and the Filarmonica Teatro Regio Torino, conducted by Gianandrea Noseda. This is one of the finest performances of this work I have heard. Ms. Buniatishvili is an amazing musician. Note her attentiveness to the orchestra during the passages when she is not playing. (The music starts around the 1:45 mark; there’s some introductory stuff.)
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And STILL, I have this song stuck in my head: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iN9CjAfo5n0
And that’s not the only song that Eric Carmen based on Rachmaninoff! His “Never Gonna Fall In Love Again” borrows melodies from the Second Symphony (which is BELOVED to me). I first heard that song on the Muzak at work, of all places, and I remember just standing someplace in The Store suddenly realizing that I was hearing Rachmaninoff in pop-song form!
I Googled the pianist and came to the first narrative: “Khatia Buniatishvili is a pianist of extremes. She has fantastic fingers, a charismatic stage presence, a warm, glowing tone and strongly expressed ideas. A number of concerto performances on YouTube leave you in no doubt about her phenomenal gifts. But, too often, she makes strange, unsupportable musical decisions..” What? It refers to this link: https://www.gramophone.co.uk/review/khatia-buniatishvili-labyrinth It’s a review of an album she played on.There is no date of the review, but she looks a bit younger.
Well, now I’m going to have to see if I can’t give that album a listen! I looked it up, and that’s her most recent album, released in 2020. She’s only 34 now, so this would have been recorded three years ago, most likely…still young, for a pianist. But it does seem to me that musical trends in classical performance are trending a bit back toward performers taking liberties at their discretion, which maybe flummoxes this reviewer (no idea how old he is). It amuses me that her album includes Cage’s 4’33” !!!