Piano Concerto No 3 / Paganini Rhapsody

Jon Nakamatsu defies fashion in the first movement of the Rachmaninov Concerto No. 3. He uses the lighter, less difficult cadenza instead of the massive, more difficult one now all but ubiquitous in performances and recordings. Like Horowitz and Rachmaninov himself in their pioneering recordings of the work, Nakamatsu emphasizes the concerto's swift elegance and grace. In such an interpretation, the longer and heavier cadenza throws the first movement irreparably off balance. Nevertheless, pianists play this piece at their own risk if they lack bone-crunching power. It was Rachmaninov himself who reportedly told Horowitz that he wrote it "for elephants."

The best modern performances of the kind Nakamatsu gives are those by Byron Janis, Vladimir Ashkenazy, and Horacio Gutierrez--all of whom command more power and sonority than Nakamatsu. In both the concerto and the accompanying Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, the young American plays gracefully, accurately, and sensitively, but he is still a middleweight matched against a heavyweight. He receives fine support from the Rochester Philharmonic and its British music director, Christopher Seaman, a man who clearly knows his way around a lush post-Romantic score. --Stephen Wigler