In August 2022, the musicians of the Rachmaninoff International Orchestra gathered in Bratislava to perform their first recording under the direction of founder and artistic director Mikhail Pletnev. There is an acclaimed arrangement of Swan Lake by Mikhail Pletnev, coupled with Rodion Shchedrin's famous arrangement of the Carmen Suite from Bizet's masterpiece.

All of Rachmaninov’s music - from his earliest student compositions to his final masterpieces – has been collected together for the first time on 32 CDs, in what is definitively the most complete and comprehensive edition of Rachmaninov’s works ever released.

The billed recital was the Bach-Busoni transcription, the Beethoven Sonata Op 111 and the Chopin Scherzos, and the rest – five items on a ‘bonus’ CD, finishing with Balakirev’s Islamey – amount nearly to a half-programme on top. The recording comes with buckets of applause, linking every item, and by the end of Islamey the audience is in a state of near frenzy (and the piano beginning to complain).

"The sonatas of Mozart are unique," said Artur Schnabel. "They are too easy for children, and too difficult for artists." It was performances like Mikhail Pletnev's that inspired Schabel's maxim. Pletnev's technique is awe-inspiring, and the smooth, room-sized sound he gets out of a grand piano promise wonderful things as one begins listening to the disc. But there's a certain refusal to fool with the music, a Zen detachment perhaps, that's necessary for a really good Mozart performance, and Pletnev does too much tinkering.

Apparently a staple in Russia, the music of Taneyev exists on the fringes of the repertoire in the West, something that should be rectified–and will be if this superb CD made by a starry cast of performers gets the attention it deserves. He’s a Romantic composer, but hardly of the heart-on-sleeve variety, since he was a master of counterpoint and firmly encased his Romantic impulses in a well-fitted classical jacket. Sometimes he makes you think of a more modern, pungent Brahms with a Russian accent.

The brilliant pianist and conductor Mikhail Pletnev, winner of the 1978 Tchaikovsky Piano Competition, is not only one of the best representatives of the Russian piano tradition, but is also a stunning and idiosyncratic interpreter of the standard repertoire. He is considered one of the greatest pianists of our time.

This is a very enjoyable program of some really worthwhile music. Glazunov's superb violin concerto from 1905 is a conservative, melodic work, but a splendid one whose popularity is definitely well deserved. Gil Shaham's approach is also rather conservative, but in the best sense of the word. The playing is beautifully phrased, warm-toned and romantic, and it is excellently supported by the Russian National Orchestra under Mikhail Pletnev. No, Shaham does not really provide any new insights, but as a library version of the work this is, I assume, possibly the best you could do.

When you listen to The Poem of Ecstasy', Scriabin advised, 'look straight into the eye of the Sun', and he made sure that Ecstasy was orchestrated in such a way as to burn itself onto the consciousness. Whether by design or not, and without leaving you with tinnitus, this new performance, in its moments of joyful - and finally tintinnabular - climactic clamour, does just that. There is a sensational resolve from (and resolution for) the horns as they eventually take over and expand the trumpets' assertions and reach for the heights. And, thankfully, Pletnev, his fearless players and his engineers have left room to maximize this moment of arrival.

Russian pianist Mikhail Pletnev has an astoundingly clean and virtuosic technique. He has the ability to bring out inner voices that in some other recordings are completely lost. These skills are sometimes enough to make his interpretations of these three early and middle period Beethoven sonatas completely satisfying. The third movement of the "Moonlight" Sonata, for example, is absolutely electrifying in its virtuosity. The first movement of the"Waldstein" and the final movement of "Appassionata" are brisk, energetic, and always completely under control. Movements such as these, where the performer's technique truly comes to the forefront, are absolutely satisfying here.

New Year’s Eve Concert 1997 – A Tribute to Carmen The program of the Berlin Philharmonic bore the title «Dances of Life, Love, and Death», and it was hardly coincidental that it was meant as an homage to Carmen. The recording of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra’s traditional New Year’s Eve Concert, conducted by Claudio Abbado, offers not only a cross section of worldfamous melodies from George Bizet’s opera, but also famous dance music that was intensely or subtly influenced by it. With: Anne Sofie von Otter, Bryn Terfel, Roberto Alagna, Gil Shaham, Mikhail Pletnev.

Schumann's contributions to the literature of the piano etude, a genre just beginning to blossom in the middle nineteenth century at the hands of Chopin and Liszt, came in three isolated, extremely productive bursts, after which he abandoned the genre forever. (It is perhaps no coincidence that Schumann was also forced to abandon hopes for a performing career after permanently crippling the fourth finger of his right hand during the early 1830s.) Schumann's earliest such effort, the Studies on Caprices of Paganini Op. 3 (1832), is at best little more than a preliminary essay toward the later, altogether more successful Concert Etudes on Caprices of Paganini, Op. 10 (1833).

Of the sons of J.S. Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel was by far the most interesting composer, as the Sonatas and Rondos played here by Mikhail Pletnev amply demonstrate. Consider Pletnev's exhilarating CD of Scarlatti sonatas: the fact that he played them anachronistically on the piano was in no way allowed to interfere with their intrinsic spirit. Here, he repeats the trick. Employing plenty of pedal and the full dynamic force of a modern concert grand, he somehow creates a quintessentially 18th-century atmosphere. And they're amazing pieces–it's a fair bet that this outstanding disc will help usher them into the mainstream repertoire, where they belong. Bach wrote them for an audience of "connoisseurs and amateurs," but that audience must have been a very superior one. To label this style "pre-classical" is to woefully shortchange it.