Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Sonata is one of the most notoriously challenging works in the late-romantic repertoire, but its lesser known predecessor, completed six years earlier in 1907, is no less demanding. Pairing the two on a disc, separated by the last piece Rachmaninov wrote, an arrangement of a Tchaikovsky song, means there’s a great deal of high-voltage playing on Rustem Hayroudinoff’s disc. But he always uses his prodigious technique intelligently; there’s no sense he’s ever highlighting the heftiness of the piano writing in a self-regarding way.
Hayroudinoff writes his own sleeve notes, in which he seems very attached to Rachmaninov’s suggestion that the three movements of the First Sonata are portraits of the three protagonists of Goethe’s Faust, though the piece seems to stand convincingly on its intrinsic merits. Hayroudinoff also reveals that he has assembled his own edition of the Second Sonata, restoring some of the cuts Rachmaninov made when he revised the work. It hangs together well, even if his performance doesn’t have quite the torrential impact of the very best on disc.
