Nikolai Lugansky and Sakari Oramo turn in a solid and smartly paced reading of the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini that matches the high (if somewhat generic) standards these artists set in their previous Rachmaninov concerto collaborations. That said, it’s not so memorable as the vividly detailed and characterized Hough/Litton, Kocsis/De Waart, Bernstein/Graffman, and Wild/Horenstein editions. This is partly due to engineering that places the piano up front and plays down Rachmaninov’s masterfully diversified orchestration. Furthermore, the City of Birmingham strings yield to the variations of timbre and collective warmth Andrew Litton elicits from their Dallas colleagues, not to mention the Dallas Symphony’s stronger brass.
In the Corelli Variations, Lugansky’s bland efficiency hardly matches the visceral power and headlong thrust that Ashkenazy commands in his three recordings. Yet, I’ll grant Lugansky’s lyrical poetry in some of the introspective variations, plus his superbly defined differentiation of detached and sustained textures. Happily, Lugansky’s sonority and expressive potential considerably open up in the Chopin Variations. His suave, cultivated fingerwork brings a relaxed glow to Variation 12’s contrapuntal textures and to Variation 8’s death-defying runs, and he contributes ravishing, otherworldly pedaling to Variation 14’s massive descending chords. He effortlessly orchestrates Variation 28’s independently moving right-hand chords and left-hand inner voices, and interweaves the final variations in a steady progression that builds without a trace of bombast. It’s a performance that easily holds its own with Scherbakov (Naxos) and Bolet (Decca). Too bad Luganski’s Corelli and Paganini variations don’t communicate similar inspiration.
