The Charles Dutoit version of the Philadelphia Orchestra sound is far from Leopold Stokowski's in the 1920s and '30s when Rachmaninoff, who died in 1943, recorded all of his concertos here. If Rachmaninoff is lurking anywhere in the orchestra, it's in the players' collective received memory rather than anything superficial. Resuscitating what the composer did on his recordings would seem easier, but Lugansky isn't trying.
"Rachmaninoff was maybe the greatest pianist of all time," he said. "But now everything is different. The pianos are different. Our possibilities are different."
And perhaps Rachmaninoff was addressing his times in ways that aren't relevant to ours. The composer's tempos are pretty fast by 2012 standards; Lugansky wonders if they were meant to answer critics who found his music to be emotionally self-indulgent.
Also, when Lugansky talks about Rachmaninoff's pianistic greatness, it's not because he hit all the notes (in some recordings, he didn't); he could achieve levels of expressivity at speeds that are impossible for others.
In any case, who would want to hear Rachmaninoff with secondhand emotionalism? "The more you play the pieces, the more you bring your body and heart to it, and the more natural it should sound," Lugansky said.
Natural is a word that comes up a lot in references to Lugansky. The 39-year-old Russian began playing at age 5, was able to correct his father's wrong notes when tapping out popular Russian tunes on a toy piano, and was found to have perfect pitch. He caught the tail end of the great Soviet tradition of pianism, studying intensively under Tatiana Nikolaeva, and placing well in contests, among them the Rachmaninoff Competition in Moscow.
