Since “Shine,” record stores can’t stock their shelves with Rach 3s fast enough. David Helfgott’s CD is the top seller, but it’s the recordings from these masters that really show off the scope of this grand, unforgiving work:
Vladimir Horowitz: After hearing Horowitz play his Third Concerto, Rachrnaninoff said he’d never play it again, and he never did. Horowitz’s best recording, with the RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra conducted by Fritz Reiner in 1951, sounds beyond human: powerful, precise, dazzlingly quick. Electric urgency suffuses the whole piece, even the moments of heartbreak. Don’t expect to breathe.
Van Cliburn: Two days after returning from his career-making victory at the 1958 Tchaikovsky Competition, the 24-year-old Cliburn recorded the Rach 3 with the Symphony of the Air conducted by Kiril Kondrashin. His reading is pure lyric turmoil. He allows himself time to locate the piece’s transcendent pain–which most pianists forgo in favor of flashiness.
Martha Argerich: Her 1982 recording with the RSO Berlin, conducted by Riccardo Chailly, is in the Horowitz tradition of flawless virtuosity; her inimitable sensuality alternates between tenderness and out-and-out lust.
Sergei Rachmaninoff: What can you say? For almost 20 years after he wrote the Third Concerto, the formidable, 6-foot-6 composer was the only pianist who dared play it in public. Conducted by Eugene Ormandy with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1989, the Rach 3 is so easily tamed by its master that Rachmaninoff’s bravura almost borders on flippancy.
