Rachmaninoff: Etudes-Tableaux

   in Piano International (May, 2016)
For Stephen Kovacevich, the Moscow-born Zlata Chochieva is a pianist ‘I would be interested to hear in anything she does, and that is rare’. Yet such praise is more than justified by this third recording for Piano Classics. Chochieva’s is a deeply personal approach to Rachmaninov, alive with an ‘inner glow’ that places emphasis, backed by a superlative technique, on the term ‘tableaux.’

Rachmaninov, like Chopin before him, fought shy of revealing the sources of his inspiration, allowing a touch of enigma to remain and leaving others to speak of oceans, seagulls and the tale of Red Riding Hood (Op 39 Nos 1, 2 and 6). And yet so vivid …