Tang, I imagine he will come back and record Rachmaninov 3, I doubt he is fearful of its technical challenge... I’m now listening to Trifonov’s Rachmaninov Paginini variations and this pianist can scale any mountain. I love all the Rachmaninov piano concertos. Far better than I could ever say here are the comments of a Russian pianist on Rachmaninov piano concerto 3
Vladimir Pleshakov:
Playing Rachmaninoff’s music with sentimentality is musical suicide. Playing his music fully objectively is musical betrayal. His music reflects humanity. Rachmaninoff’s sources of inspiration are very diverse: pre-tonal church chant dating centuries back, highly distilled folk song, visual art, literary allusions, subtle influences of the oriental Russia, of Ravel, Faure, Gershwin, highly distilled American jazz, and other influences he never talked much about (such as family, friends, self-imposed exile).
He walked a pathway parallel, but never too close, to Arensky, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, and more distantly, Chopin and Liszt. He never imitated, consciously or unconsciously, any of them. He was interested in ballet, in American musicals, in Stanislavsky-type theater. He loved the human voice, and it permeates like a rare fragrance all of his music - orchestral, vocal, and piano. He was also a superb conductor, and a superb orchestrator, transferring both of these skills into his piano music especially in terms of rhythm and color, but never for cheap effect. One can say that his piano music, for all of its apparent explosion of notes, is actually sparse and austere. In some ways, there is not a single superfluous note - the texture has been carefully pruned by the composer.
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