Music for Rachmaninov, Neville Cardus once wrote, ‘is not, as it is, say, with Horowitz, first an inspiration to brilliant and lovely piano playing. And notes for Rachmaninov are not, as they often seem for Schnabel, so many symbols of an invisible spiritual universe. Music is Rachmaninov’s “way of life”, his instinctive means of expressing experience. The piano is part of the universe in which he lives, as natural to his thinking and feeling as speech and physical reflex action … he plays from the creative centre outwards—not from the piano inwards’ (The Manchester Guardian, 12 March 1936).