Rachmaninov: Piano Concerto No. 2; Paganini Rhapsody.

Rachmaninov: Piano Concerto No. 2; Paganini Rhapsody. Lang Lang, piano; Valery Gergiev, Orchestra of the Marinsky Theatre. DG B000390202.

Yet another live recording. Ho-hum. I'm not sure why DG, EMI, and others are so keen lately on recording everything before a live audience, but it isn't helping the sonics of the recordings any. Well, at least we're spared the applause.

Young pianist Lang Lang shows a mature approach to Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto, appropriately focusing his attention on the work's long sigh of a second movement rather than on the portentous introduction or the overtly romanticized finale. But his virtuoso technique is even more amply displayed in the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, where his fingers dazzle and the keyboard lights up. I'm not sure these performances are any better than any of a haft dozen classic interpretations we have on disc from Janis, Rubinstein, Cliburn, Ashkenazy, Argerich, Wild, or Horowitz, but Lang is certainly in that class. Needless to say, the eighteenth Paganini variation, the Andante Cantabile, is ravishing.

But there is that nagging issue of the sound. The live recording never seems to come to life. It's soft and vague, the instruments often seeming too recessed compared to the piano, which sometimes looms in the foreground twenty feet wide. Nor is the depth perception too impressive. Fortunately, the dynamics and bass are OK, if none too solid. A quick listen to Rubinstein doing the Paganini Variations close to fifty years ago on an RCA Living Stereo disc makes one wonder just how far we've advanced in sound recording, if at all.