"This is one of the most rewarding and exciting new piano releases I have heard. Hayroudinoff's performances are so entrancing that listeners may be loath to set it aside, much like a book that 'one cannot put down'. Rachmaninoff's ubiquitous C-sharp minor Prelude … proves to be the most beautiful account of this hackneyed piece imaginable. The pianist moves from one revelation to another, his conceptions of the Preludes remarkably rounded and rife with touches and gestures of the old-style pianism. His understanding of the composer's tonal language is precocious, and his playing is full of evocative shading, pedalling, and nuance. The collector can choose from several outstanding recordings of Rachmaninoff's Preludes. At the top is Richter, with this recording by Hayroudinoff a close second, though in several of the Preludes … I think he surpasses Richter."

"One of the qualities most needed in Rachmaninov’s music is the graceful lack of apparent effort, and that is precisely why Rustem Hayroudinoff is so engaging. It is not at all the same thing as nonchalance, or being cool, and if you compare his recording of the very first Prelude, in C sharp minor, with Lympany’s most recent version, you are at once aware that the level of expressive intensity is greatly heightened. Hayroudinoff brings a sense of urgency – dark fatalism, even – to the music’s message…Hayroudinoff’s razor-sharp rhythmic attack is hardly blunted,…while his fluency, heedless of hurdles, and his sensitive balancing of strands within Rachmaninov’s sonorous textures beg, without undue unction, to be relished".