LDV45

26 RACHMANINOFF // MUSSORGSKY You have already recorded the complete Rachmaninoff concertos. Why the Moments musicaux ? The Moments musicaux is a fascinating set of pieces. Rachmaninoff was only twenty-three years old when he composed them, and yet he already carried within himself all the emotion, all the anguish and all the nostalgia that he was to express in the rest of his output. I have already played some of the Moments many times and I always come back to them. There’s something in the writing that gives you the feeling that you should never let go of the keyboard, that you have to stay inside the music all the time in order to be able to sculpt the phrases and balance the discourse. You’re constantly ‘holding’ the musical lines, guiding them in the right direction, moulding the material like a kind of sculptor in sound. It sometimes happens that certain passages of the Moments musicaux sound like organ music. Rachmaninoff achieves such combinations of sonority that they sometimes attain the amplitude of a place of worship. When I play them, I feel as if I’m surpassing myself, transcending myself – it’s something on a higher level. Once all the technical obstacles have been overcome, of course! Because it really is a very complex piece. You have to know what you keep in your head and what you put in your fingers. As the conductor Roberto Benzi once joked to me: ‘To play Rachmaninoff well, you have to know how to play all the notes, but above all how not to play them all!’