Boris Giltburg plays Rachmaninov, Town Hall, Birmingham, 23 November, 2023.

5*****: David Gray & Paul Gray.

Sergei Rachmaninov – Prelude in C sharp minor. Op 3 No 2

Preludes, Op 23

Preludes, Op 32

“A towering achievement that brings Rachmaninov’s preludes to vivid life.”

Watching a performer can tell one a lot about their approach to the music they play. There are no dramatic flourishes, nor melodramatic raising of hands before Pianist, Boris Giltburg begins to play. A moment of stillness and then his hands flow onto the keyboard. It is as though the music is arising

spontaneously from a through, or a from a feeling, and then suddenly made manifest.

From watching, as much as from listening, it is clear that this performer’s modus operandi is to absorb the music so completely that it becomes his own, a part of him, and then to express it from a symbiotic place where composer and performer have, in the deepest understanding of the music, become one.

It is often a truism, that a composer’s chamber and small-scale works are the place where we can find them at their most personal and intimate. Rachmaninov’s Preludes are, on the face of it, a collection of brief, freestanding pieces; he never performed them all in the same concert. However, they are, each individually, works of great scale and significance, in terms of the imagination the composer brought to bear, and the thoroughness with which he explores the core thematic, textural and harmonic ideas.

In performing them all in one go, Giltburg sets himself an enormous challenge: to bring twenty-four distinct pieces of incredibly technically demanding, compositionally complex and emotionally rich music to life, and to do so in a way that takes the audience on an inescapably engaging journey of phycological and emotional unfolding.

Giltburg achieves this through a level of commitment and immersion in the truth of the music. His astonishing technical accomplishment becomes a given; a secondary consideration at the service of meaning, expressing and imagination. Phrasing, coloration, fleeting moments of stillness - where the light of silence shines through - the detail is breathtaking, but always achieved with a spontaneity, a fluidity, a freshness that makes one feel that this is Giltburg’s music as much as it is Rachmaninoff’s.

This pianist’s reading of this cycle of Preludes is a towering pianistic and expressive achievement. It truly was, in the exquisitely beautiful setting of Birmingham Town Hall, as though time had stood still. Simply magical; simply breathtaking.

Boris Giltburg - Piano