Back in 2015, Fanfare singled out Ekaterina
Litvintseva’s first solo album of Rachmaninoff,
including the Moments musicaux Op.16, as
an ‘impressive outing… her playing is tonally
rich and extremely thoughtful.’ Since then, she
has assembled an impressive and critically acclaimed
catalogue on Piano Classics, including
most recently the great Trio elégiaque which
Rachmaninoff wrote in memory of Tchaikovsky:
‘an attractive and valuable disc’ (Fanfare).
Litvintseva now turns to a trio of uncontested
masterpieces by the Russian composer, demonstrating
within a single album the range of his
stylistic evolution over the course of 40 years.
He was still a teenager, studying at the Moscow
Conservatoire, when he wrote his First Piano
Concerto in 1891.
On the instruction of his teachers, he took the
Grieg Concerto as a model, and poured his
own invention into it: a remarkably successful
strategy, as it turned out, because the finished
work is both strong and personal, touched
with many of those fingerprints of gesture
and harmony which we have come to think
of as quintessentially Rachmaninoff. These
include flights of lyric fantasy and equally
sudden, unexpected turns towards melancholy
introspection.
Rachmaninoff had become an international
celebrity by 1913, when he took his family to
live the high life with him in Rome, at a home
which Tchaikovsky had once used. In the
Italian capital he began work on the imposing
Second Piano Sonata, though the work had
to be completed back at the family estate,
Ivanovka, when his daughters came down with
typhus.
Rachmaninoff overhauled the Sonata in 1931,
cutting and in some places simplifying its form,
and it is this version which Litvintseva plays:
a stylistic bridge between mid-period and
late-style in a composer whose capacity for
reinvention has often been underestimated.
By 1941 he was an exile living in the US and
Switzerland, where he wrote his Variations on
a theme of Corelli – the ‘La folia’ theme adopted
by countless of his predecessors. Informed
by decades of pianistic and creative mastery,
Rachmaninoff makes the theme his own with
a neoclassical severity and haunting economy
of expression. Thus, taken as a whole,
Ekaterina Litvintseva’s new album pays a
wide-ranging and personal tribute to a
composer who has inspired her playing since
her formation in Siberia.