Rachmaninov: Piano Sonatas CD review – high-voltage intelligence

Rustem Hayroudinoff(Onyx)Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Sonata is one of the most notoriously challenging works in the late-romantic repertoire, but its lesser known predecessor, completed six years earlier in 1907, is no less demanding. Pairing the two on a disc, separated by the last piece Rachmaninov wrote, an arrangement of a Tchaikovsky song, means there’s a great deal of high-voltage playing on Rustem Hayroudinoff’s disc. But he always uses his prodigious technique intelligen