SERGEI RACHMANINOFF PLAYS

On this page, Rachmaninoff plays the music of other great composers.  Here you will hear works by composers as diverse as Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky and Scriabin.  We have the opportunity to study his playing of piano music written in styles very different from his own and each other.  Here we really put to the test his ability as an interpreter of other composers.

I do not include his playing of Chopin in this category and dedicate to it a page of its own simply because Chopin's music, while from a time almost 100 years earlier, is so pianistic in nature that it is born of the piano as is Rachmaninoff's own piano music.  Attempts to Orcestrate it, while a few have been successful, lose the pianistic essence of Chopin in the process.

Of particular interest are Rachmaninoff's approaches to the "Harmonious Blacksmith" and the Gluck transcription of the "Melody" from Orfeo.  Both are exquisitely and beautifully played, very romantic, and not at all in the historical style of the music.  Works for me, though!

The way Rachmaninoff plays the "Turkish March" is unlike any I have ever heard.  Typically pianists go wild over the marching drum beat as though they want to make absolutely certain of our we taking note of it.  Rachmaninoff plays it with a classical restraint to wonderful effect, a case of less is more to be sure.

It is interesting to note the similarities between the Moszkowski etude and the Chopin "Butterfly" etude.  But perhaps most interesting to me is his performance of the Schubert impromptu which has little of the Schubert I know and love in it.  And, of course, Rachmaninoff plays Schumann's "Carnaval" which he considered to be one of the two or three greatest works for piano ever penned.

Finally, several works for violin and piano performed by Rachmaninoff and Fritz Kreisler.

Daquin  "Le Coucou" from Premier Livre de Pièces: Troisième Suite

recorded in 1920