Home listening - Rachmaninov sends a postcard home

The Guardian 0

Steven Osborne excels in the Etudes-Tableaux, while Gergiev and the LSO blaze their way through the symphonies

• Rachmaninov wanted his two sets of Etudes-Tableaux, Op 33 (1911) and Op 39 (1916-17), “picture studies”, to bring to mind external stimuli: a picture or poem or landscape. Yet the composer said little about what those stimuli might be. Later, Rachmaninov allowed Ottorino Respighi to orchestrate five of these short piano works, providing him with descriptions so specific (sea and seagulls; scene at a fair; an oriental march), you wonder about the silence concerning the rest. It instils the works with a certain mystery, captured imaginatively and authoritatively by Steven Osborne (on Hyperion). As Rachmaninov said, “a small piece can become as lasting a masterpiece as a large work”. Osborne proves his point.