Recording of the Week, Rachmaninov's Études-tableaux from Steven Osborne

Steven Osborne in Rachmaninov never fails to take me by surprise. His marvellous recordings of the Preludes and Piano Sonata notwithstanding, it always comes as a slight shock to me that the Scottish pianist (who’s made a speciality of thornier twentieth-century composers, such as Tippett, Britten and Stravinsky) has such an affinity with the great composer-pianist’s more obviously Romantic writing. But he’s done it again: these accounts of the two sets of Études-Tableaux from 1911 and 1916/17 respectively rank with the very best, both for the unshowy technical prowess on display and the ability to paint pictures in sound that made his Mussorgsky recording in 2013 such a resounding success. (Rachmaninov was coaxed out of his customary reticence regarding his extra-musical inspirations when Respighi approached him about orchestrating a handful of these pieces in 1930, and Osborne animates the narratives which the composer provided with the skill of a supreme story-teller).

Osborne approaches these works as fundamentally lyrical, introspective miniature masterworks rather than quasi-symphonic showpieces, and there’s none of the overt percussiveness that Rachmaninov’s writing can sometimes encourage: he’s less forthright and muscular than Boris Giltburg (whose 2016 set on Naxos marked him out as a Rachmaninovian to watch), and his tempos are generally a notch or two slower than those of Vladimir Ashkenazy (whose 1973 Decca Eloquence account has been my benchmark recording of these pieces, though Osborne is now jostling for pride of place). But despite his lack of ego and reluctance to play to the gallery, there’s never any sense of anonymity or engagingness: one of the things that makes Osborne’s playing so magical is his knack of drawing the listener in rather than shutting them out, so that the overall effect is that we’re welcome eavesdroppers on a private performance rather than experiencing these works in a conventional recital. Try the extended sea-picture of Op. 39 No. 2, which comes across as the ruminations of someone improvising in front of an open window with a beautiful coastal view, or the Pathétique-esque Op. 33 No. 3 which begins from a place of quiet soul-searching before relaxing into almost Hollywood-ish lushness.

If the prevailing approach is one of understatement and even diffidence, Osborne certainly doesn’t disappoint in the more extrovert ‘pictures’ (such as the Sorochinsky Fair-like Op. 33 No. 7, and the exuberant final étude of Op. 39, which brings the album to a barnstorming close). In fact, his natural inclination towards introspection makes the moments when he does open out into something more expansive all the more engaging, rather like those instances when the introvert at a party suddenly holds forth with a perfectly-judged witty anecdote. (I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing him twice, and on both occasions was charmed by the very same tendency in his conversational style).

He’s also a master-painter when it comes to the more explicitly visual of these ‘study-pictures’, summoning up the Brothers Grimm-ish vision of Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in Op. 39 No. 6 with all the relish of a cinema-pianist accompanying a silent movie, and conjuring the dank, elegiac atmosphere of the funeral procession in Op. 39 No. 7 so vividly that you can almost smell the mist and rain before the tolling bells cut through with near-orchestral sonority. (These two pieces in particular had me digging out that copy of his equally evocative recording of Pictures of an Exhibition, which deservedly won a Gramophone Award in 2013).

This is an immensely satisfying experience on its own terms, then, but I defy anyone to listen and not come away hungry for more Rachmaninov from Osborne. There are several moments in Op. 39 which hark back to the Second and Third Piano Concertos, and which had me dreaming of how those war-horses might sound through the lens of Osborne’s thoughtful, restrained pianism. They might be among the most recorded works in the repertoire (the past year alone has brought impressive accounts of individual concertos from Giltburg, Yvgeny Sudbin and Denis Matsuev, with a Daniil Trifonov series in the pipeline) but make no mistake, we need a set from this most eloquent of pianists. I’m tempted to start a CrowdFunder for it myself.