The Wigmore Hall could have taken an easy way out with the 150th birthday of Sergei Rachmaninov, perhaps by marking the event with a programme of his popular piano pieces and songs. Instead it opted for what are perhaps his biggest and most challenging solo-piano works, the two sonatas, and invited Steven Osborne to play them on the exact anniversary.
Rachmaninov himself had misgivings about both the sonatas, never including the first (which he completed in 1906, between the second and third piano concertos) in his recitals after he left Russia in 1917, and subsequently revising and substantially cutting the second, originally composed in 1913. But, as Osborne’s performances so magnificently demonstrated, however much the structures may sprawl or the textures become congested, especially in the first sonata, both works contain passages of unmistakable power and intensity.
