Even in a less crowded Rachmaninov concerto market than today’s, these brisk, assured, yet interpretively lightweight performances would have faced superior competition. The C minor abounds with imaginative woodwind concertante details and endless lyrical phrases where the strings really need to crank out the tone. You wouldn’t know that from Dmitry Liss’ largely undifferentiated orchestral framework. The same observation holds true for the D minor, where you wonder if the conductor or the producer is responsible for the consistently confusing soloist/orchestra perspective. True, Boris Berezovsky has technique to burn (he sails through the Third’s more difficult chord-based cadenza with no sweat), but his tone turns ugly above mezzo-forte, which accounts for about 75 percent of the time. Indeed, the pianist’s earlier recording on Teldec (with Eliahu Inbal) boasts pockets of lyrical poetry that are streamlined here, plus warmer, more robust engineering. With so many first-class recordings of these warhorses available–Hough or Kocsis in both, Zimerman, Andsnes, and Richter in the Second, Argerich in the Third–this one’s superfluous.
