Yeah..heh..I do think Romance was the better effort of the two. But seriously Tears has its own beauty too. The main difficulty for me was precisely the minimalism - with the repeated motifs and patterns, how does one make it interesting, without sounding mannered or that one is trying too hard? I had to experiment with all kinds of voicing, pedalling, rubato etc, but right now, my instinct seems to be that the simpler and more direct the better! This recording is a little too mannered for my tastes now. If I were to play it again, I would play it in a much more straightforward manner.
As for your comment about Romanticism, I completely agree with you! For me, yjr Romantic idiom is just so natural, just so instinctive to human expression (or at least my idea of expression), that I simply cannot understand the outright rejection of it in the 20th century. I sometimes wonder for example, how one could not listen to the third movement of Rach's Second Symphony and yet not be moved! Music to me is about the communication of deep feeling, and it should never be overly intellectualized and academic. It is no surprise that with the trend towards atonality, and dry intellectualism in "classical" music (used in a very broad sense of the term), the art form has been on a gradual decline in the past century. What would you expect given when it has become a dry academic exercise and lost relevance to people's lives and innermost feelings?
Topic: "Tears" from Rachmaninoff's Suite no.1 for 2 pianos