By releasing recordings just because it can, rather than because it should, Chandos is making a classic “big label” mistake with its ongoing CD series featuring Valeri Polyansky and the Russian State Symphony Orchestra. Polyansky’s Rachmaninov outings to date already offer the worst performances of the composer’s music that I have ever heard, and this new one is no exception. Polyansky hasn’t a clue how to handle Rachmaninov’s characteristic rubato. The symphony’s opening theme has a self-conscious “expressiveness” that keeps the music from accumulating any sort of momentum at all. He doesn’t seem to understand that an expressive slowing has to be “paid for” a few bars later with a compensating accelerando and subsequent return to the basic pulse. As a consequence, the entire first movement has no main tempo; it’s merely a series of lurches and ritards. Rachmaninov himself, in his RCA recording of the symphony, clearly demonstrates how this should be done, and while there are certainly other approaches, if the basic musicality isn’t there, the results will sound, well, like this performance: shapeless, jerky, and self-consciously vulgar.
And then there’s the orchestra: cautious, characterless, and over-parted in the brass and winds. Compare their feeble jabbing at the slow movement’s quick middle section, or any passage in the finale, to Ormandy’s Philadelphians from the late 60s. It’s embarrassing. Ormandy even gets the better recording. Polyanski’s orchestra sounds trapped in an acoustic fog; the resonance swamps the deep bass, and swallows the highs as well. What excuse can there possibly be for not even hearing the cymbals, particularly at the climax of the first movement’s lyrical second subject? What excuse, other than bad conducting and inept recording, accounts for the terrible balances between strings and winds? And for this Chandos expects you to pay full price, even though you can get Ormandy’s Philadelphia recordings of all three Rachmaninov symphonies gorgeously remastered on a super budget Essential Classics twofer! Although Polyansky does better in the unaccompanied choral music (his performance of “Spring” is a bore, the sonic problems exacerbated by the presence of a chorus behind the orchestra), why couldn’t Chandos play to these performers’ strengths and simply offer Rachmaninov’s comparatively neglected “a cappella” choral music and leave it at that? As it is, the series of symphonic recordings with these forces defines the word “worthless” from virtually any point of view, artistic or economic.
