When I listen to the music of Rachmaninov, so great and so immensely dramatic - like a liturgy that is a celebration of Destiny -, I find myself thinking. Rachmaninov exspresses what I am, and what the friend that is sitting beside me is, and the friend that is sitting in front of me. For the Russian master's concertos are not extraneous to the experience of a vitality and if a humanity lived with spontaneity: those notes, strong and dramatic, represent the heart of eating and drinking, laughing and weeping, and the tiredness that hits us and makes us fall asleep. They express the greatness of our presence in the cosmos. They give peace, too: in every movement the undaunted resistance of the positivity of things inexorably overcomes every tremor that invades the mind and the heart and threatens to destroy the word, the mind and the earth, reducing everything to nothing in the "night of the world".

(Excerpt from the introduction by Luigi Giussani to the booklet enclosed in the CD)