PIANO: GREAT RECORDINGS
Sony Music 88843091752 (30 CDs)
Continued from Part II:
The multi-Grammy and Gramophone Award winner Murray Perahia has three discs - the most for a single pianist - to his name. His disc of Bach’s Goldberg Variations edges out Glenn Gould, for reasons only known to record executives. I would have loved Perahia and Gould included, simply for the sake of comparison. His Gramophone Award winning album of Handel’s Keyboard Suites (including The Harmonious Blacksmith) and selection of Scarlatti Sonatas (no doubt an influence by Horowitz) is excellent.
The third disc is the best-selling piano duo recital with Radu Lupu (1945-2022) which had Schubert’s Fantasy in F minor, Mozart’s Sonata in D major (K.448), Variations in G major (K.501) and Fantasy in F minor (K.608). If only this “billion dollar” duo had recorded more than this.
By no means making the numbers are the German Gerhard Oppitz who is totally idiomatic in the rarely heard and performed Carl Maria von Weber Konzertstuck in F minor (Op.79) and both piano concertos with the Bavarian Radio Orchestra and Colin Davis. The Uzbekistan-born Yefim Bronfman is the fire-eating virtuoso in an all-Russian disc of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, Stravinsky’s Three Movements from Petrushka and Tchaikovsky’s Dumka.
The younger generation has not been ignored. Evgeny Kissin is totally idiomatic in Chopin’s Four Ballades, Berceuse, Barcarolle and Scherzo No.4, where musicality, intellect and virtuosity find a rare parity. His compatriot Arcadi Volodos should have been honoured with his 1997 Sony debut disc of encores, but we get instead Schubert’s incomplete Sonata No.1 in E major (D.157) and Sonata No.18 in G major (D.894, the so-called Fantasie), fine performances nonetheless.
After Volodos, the fall-off in terms of big name appeal is a marked one, with recitals by Martin Stadtfeld, Juan Jose Chuquisengo and Nikolai Tokarev, all of whom are not household names despite their interesting programmes.
For all the discs, original cover art has been retained. While track-listings are available on the back, there is no booklet or biographical essays to speak of. Without sounding like a broken gramophone, despite its successes, this collection still comes across as a missed opportunity.
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