I'm a fan of Ralph Moore's reviews, and I was interested to see his interesting recent discussion of the phenomenal Yunchan Lim performance of the Rachmaninoff Third Concerto. My friend, Jon Nakamatsu, was there at the 2022 Cliburn Competition when Lim won the gold, although Nakamatsu was an online commentator at that time, rather than a judge as he was at the most recent "Cliburn 2025" a few months ago. He told me that, in his opinion, the 2023 Competition's winners consisted of Yunchan Lim, and then a BIG gap, and then the rest of the competitors. That's how good Lim was.

I'm sorry however that Decca decided to issue the actual competition performance of the Rachmaninoff, rather than investing in a studio production with another conductor, because Marin Alsop's contribution to this performance is remarkably anodyne IMHO.

OTOH, I'm glad that Ralph (may I call him Ralph, instead of Mr. Moore?) picked the Horowitz/Ormandy and Janis/Dorati recordings as comparisons, especially the latter, which IMHO is one of the most brilliant recordings the work has ever received. But I was surprised to see the statement in the review, "Janis. . . rattles through the concerto five or six minutes faster than either [Lim or Horowitz]". That difference in timing is accounted for by the fact that Janis takes cuts in the work (just as he did in his earlier recording with Munch). I don't want to lengthen this post too much by quoting chapter and verse here, but I'd be happy to post a follow-up if folks are interested.

In any case, taking cuts in this Concerto was much more common back in the 50's and 60's, and it's a comparatively recent phenomenon of the last few decades that almost every performance you now hear of the work is uncut. Indeed, the Horowitz recordings provide us with a panorama of the "performance practice" showing the extent to which cuts were phased out over the decades of the Concerto's performances: his early performance Coates was very heavily cut, while his later performance with Reiner was also cut (but not as much - about the same as the Janis performances), and his 70's performance with Ormandy is uncut (IIRC - I haven't heard it in awhile).

In any case, thanks to Ralph for the review and for his spelling of Rachmaninoff's name! After all, that was the way the composer spelled it himself!