Podcast: ‘Rach 3’. The Mount Everest of piano concertos.

Raymond Bisha helps turn the pages of Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto, following the release of Boris Giltburg’s fine performance of the work with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto. Noted for its length and technical difficulty, ‘Rach 3’ (its popular moniker) is reckoned to have more notes than all of Mozart’s Read More …

Concerto superbo!

At the time of sitting down to write this edition of Thought for the Week, I decided to consult the Naxos monthly bestsellers  lists and consider writing a retrospective about our 2017 market leaders. While reviewing the January-October rankings, two things stood out. First, in no fewer than three of those months, the bestselling release Read More …

Podcast: Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto

Raymond Bisha introduces Boris Giltburg’s latest album of music by Sergei Rachmaninov that features the Études-tableaux Op. 33 and his ever-popular Piano Concerto No. 2. The latter charts a dramatic course: from the passion, darkness and pain of the first movement, through the dreamy idyll of the second, to the unequivocal victory of the finale. Read More …

Podcast: John Field’s Piano Concertos Nos. 2 and 7 + Piano Sonata No. 4

The pianist and composer John Field certainly didn’t let the grass grow under his feet. He was born in Dublin, spent time in Bath and London, performed before Haydn, sustained a long European association with Clementi, then took Russian residency for a quarter of a century before spending his final years battling the illness that Read More …