Your Tatler has listened to more performances and recordings of “Rach 3” (as musician types have dubbed it, and Bickerstaff’s favorite among the four concertos) than he can recall. There are many excellent recordings of this monsterpiece© and it’s heartening so many of them are by younger artists, who possess the requisite chops to handle the insanely difficult passages and make them seem easy.
Despite all the wonderful modern recordings of Rach 3, Bickerstaff’s favorite has always been the first one made in 1940 on 78 rpm records, the soloist being none other than the old man himself, Rachmaninoff, he of the giant hands and fingers, with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Even with its primitive audio, the composer’s performance, to these ears, has outclassed all the otherwise excellent later ones.
Today however your Tatler streamed a recording he had somehow missed before, the 1960 Mercury recording with the late Byron Janis piano and Antol Dorati conducting the London Philharmonic. Not only is the audio first rate, with its remastering in 192 kHz, 24-bit sound, Janis’s extraordinary playing is the equal of Rachmaninoff’s, an audacious claim indeed, but your Tatler stands by it. Listening to it is as if Rachmaninoff and Ormandy had come back from the dead to record it one last time.
Which is not to say Janis’s recording is a carbon copy of the first one. Janis was his own man and his interpretation differs from the composer’s throughout, but they are relatively minor differences. Rach 3 fans, if they haven’t heard this recording already, must listen to this one, whatever the format. Prepare to be dazzled.
The Taos Tatler 