Rachmaninov Etudes-Tableaux
From a review in Gramophone, January 1995
by Bryce Morrison
...Perhaps the Moscow location helped to provide
that extra edge, allowed Lugansky to re-create the "mystic aureole" he speaks of
and imbue his performance with "the very essence of Russia, her people and
nature, griefs and festivities, her mysterious spirit". In Op.33 the
goose-stepping opening is given with superb mastery and the richest sense of
variety, the Second Etude with all the breadth and generosity one associates
with the finest Russian talent. Never for a moment would you question Lugansky's
nationality, his feel for the engulfing Siberian storm of No.6 or his way of
bestriding the vast spaces of No.9 like a true colossus of the keyboard. In the
ever more turbulent pages of Op.39 (a premonition of the Revolution of the
death of the old Russia) he rides the shock waves of No.1 with ease, and in the
powerful re-working of the Dies irae of No.2 he achieves a glorious
eloquence. He locates the darkness beneath so much outward festivity in No.4
and it is only in the later etudes that he loses some of his intensity and
projection. Even when faced with exceptionally dramatic and urbane alternative
Etudes-Tableaux from Ashkenazy and Howard Shelley, respectively, Lugansky more
than holds his own.