Rachmaninoff Piano Concertos 2 & 4

(...) In her reading, she (together with the conductor!) takes the listener by the hand to walk through the spiritual world of Rachmaninoff, laying bare his ‘angst’ and ‘expectations’. Such is the magic of a pianist who takes time to let the audience participate in these feelings. A ‘true’ interpretation one might say.

Nothing on my shelves comes close. (...)

Fedorova is powerful and poetic without overt sentimentality, so that the central Largo is warm and expressive without being pulled around or having too much fur-coat comfort in the more languorous passages. The final Allegro vivace is riotously enjoyable, which is as it should be.

Anna Fedorova is a remarkable talent. She is right in the top of my list for outstanding performers in recent years. Now she is expanding her recorded repertoire to include some of the most challenging pieces for piano and orchestra. And the results are compelling.

Fedorova is a deeply empathetic musician. Her performances are never bravura just for the sake of showing off technical skills, which she has aplenty. No, her performances dig more deeply into the meaning of the music with a strong affinity to revealing the emotions at play. And yet her performances are filled with intelligence. Listening to one of her recordings is like a conversation with your favorite friend who brings such deep insight to your thoughts and psychological state. She does this with the music she performs and we are allowed to come along for the conversation.

This is as fine and engaging a performance of the Second as I have in my music library. Anna Fedorova plays with great intimacy, without ever bringing her virtuosity to the fore, yet that technical skill clearly is always underlying what she is doing else we would not be as enraptured as we are with the performance. In her humble approach she is literally a "servant of the work" for which we can be forever grateful.

Ukrainian pianist Anna Fedorova is clearly not only a fine human being... but also a remarkable artist. (...)

The recording was made in November 2021, before the current horrors were unleashed, but Federova is as thoughtful in her post-hoc introduction as she is in the performances. She reminds us, in the face of resistance to Russian repertoire right now, that Rachmaninov was also a refugee who never returned to the motherland after 1918. She also explains her reasons for placing the Fourth Concerto first, defining this amazing and often enigmatic work as ‘a farewell to the past and a dive into a quite terrifying future’, while the Second reminds her of a phoenix. May the Ukrainian phoenix rise from the ashes as soon as possible.