From The Columbus Dispatch, Sunday, January 23, 2000.

Lofty standard set with Rachmaninoff

By Ralph O’Dette
For the Dispatch

Pianist Garrick Ohlsson played an all-Rachmaninoff program at the Southern Theater last night as the first offering of the year by the Columbus Chamber Music Society.

The enthusiastic audience was treated to a combination of technical brilliance and musicality that set a high standard for the rest of the season.

Rachmaninoff thought himself primarily a composer, and he disliked concretizing as a pianist. But his phenomenal playing technique led him to create music that demands power, delicacy and lyricism at extremes of soft and loud, slow and fast – and almost always expressed in torrents and handfuls of notes.

Ohlsson easily met all those demands.

The program ranged from the early Prelude in C-sharp Minor, Op. 3, No. 2, which became so popular the composer grew to hate it, to his final work for solo piano, Variations on a Theme of Corelli, Op. 42. Between these chronological markers were the other famous prelude, the one in G Minor, Op. 23 No. 2; several transcriptions of other composers’ music, and the staggeringly difficult, if musically unconvincing Sonata No. 2 in B-flat Minor, Op. 36.

Rachmaninoff took the theme for his variation from a sonata by the Baroque master Corelli, who used a much older Portuguese tune called La Folia. Rachmaninoff hardly ever lets the theme completely disappear during his 20 kaleidoscopic variations, but the net effect is to make one appreciate even more his next opus, the marvelous Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, variations for piano and orchestra.

The transcriptions are not often played. A Suite from Bach’s Violin Partita in E Major was a fairly straight rendering for modern romantic piano.

Mendelssohn’s Scherzo from A Midsummer Night’s Dream was Puck on steroids – and a tour de force. The final Love’s Joy was a stunning concert etude based more or less on ideas of Fritz Kreisler.

As tired of the two preludes as some might be, Ohlsson made them fresh.

It was a fine evening for lovers of the virtuoso piano, but it was enough Rachmaninoff to last me for a while.

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