‘Shadows of My Ancestors’

Prokofiev Ten Pieces from Romeo and Juliet, Op 75

Ravel Gaspard de la nuit

Saidaminova The Walls of Ancient Bukhara

Behzod Abduraimov pf

Alpha ALPHA1028

The title of Behzod Abduraimov’s dazzling latest album, ‘Shadows of My Ancestors’, is intriguing, though Nicolas Derny’s accompanying booklet note leaves you more mystified than informed. Naturally, Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo and Juliet makes its ancestry clear, and the composer’s 1937 piano transcription of 10 episodes is sufficiently vivid and compulsive to make you recall a fractious history (the prima ballerina Galina Ulanova, reportedly horrified at having to dance to Prokofiev’s modernist rhythms, declared: ‘For never was a story of more woe / Than Prokofiev’s music for Romeo’). But together with Cinderella, his other ballet transcription for piano, an awareness grew of a relatively amiable move away from the early iconoclasm of works such as the Toccata, Suggestion diabolique and Sarcasms. By comparison Romeo and Juliet is as affectionate as it is strong, and never more so than from Abduraimov, whose performance is of an engulfing command that never excludes poetry or warmth. Nothing escapes his eagle ear and eye for details always illuminated rather than clouded by his roaring, all-Russian command. His ‘Young Juliet’ could hardly be more feisty, alive with adolescent mood swings, while the warring households of the Montagues and Capulets come at you in a heavy and menacing tread. In Abduraimov’s hands Hamlet’s ‘wild and whirling words’ could apply equally to ‘Mercutio’, and there is a special poignancy in ‘Romeo and Juliet before Parting’, a sense of prophecy as the lovers head towards their tragic end. Competition on record is fierce but Abduraimov is more richly inclusive and virtuosic than others.

A surprise offering comes from Abduraimov’s tribute to fellow Uzbek composer Dilorom Saidaminova (b1943), whose The Walls of Ancient Bukhara pays homage to Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. But if the homage is not clear, Saidaminova’s music is full of an enigmatic Eastern mystery, whether in the mysterious evaporating end to ‘Mosque Kalon’, ‘Shadows of My Ancestors’ (which gives the album its title) or in the grim ‘Minaret of Death’.

In Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit Abduraimov provides a flawless union of imaginative delicacy and formidable pianism. His aristocratic indifference to difficulty means that he is free to explore every nook and cranny of this macabre masterpiece. You are made compulsively aware of Ravel’s fear of his own creation (‘perhaps I went too far’) as well as of Cortot’s claim that Gaspard is ‘among the most astonishing examples of interpretative virtuosity ever contrived by the industry of composers’. In ‘Scarbo’ – where Ravel transforms the waltz, with its suggestion of romantic nostalgia and ballroom glitter, into a world of nightmare – the racing three in a bar is brilliantly maintained and the final pages are overwhelming. This is among the most outstanding of all Gaspards on record.

Bryce Morrison

Character Pieces & Grotesqueries

Alkan Complete Piano Music, Vol 6

Mark Viner pf

Piano Classics PCL10275

In March 1848 L’Artiste, France’s leading art journal, exalted the ‘genius of liberty’ – ‘in the realm of art, as in that of morals, social thought and politics, barriers are falling and the horizon is expanding’. Opera, ballet and folies, salon tinsel and boudoir bagatelles may have been Paris’s daily fare. Alongside, however, a far-seeking concert d’esprits aspired to radically different plains. From the 1830s and ’40s Berlioz, Chopin and Alkan progressively revolutionised the field, with Liszt – adventurer of the 1834 Harmonies poétiques et religieuses and Apparitions – in transient attendance. Alkan’s theatre amounted to a psychodrama of lights and shadows, circling and stark, here jagged, there tender, rarely obliging. Aria/recitative allusions, scythed-through interpolations, guillotine cadences. Frenetic tempos, hallowed caesuras. Sky-and-earth separations of register, dynamic and texture. Explosions of notes hurtling over cliffs. Wracked repetitions. Maelstroms, earthquakes, silent pools. Seething states of mind. Lyric poems, fraught tragedies. Critics and peers watched in awe.

This latest instalment of Mark Viner’s Piano Classics cycle traverses varied, terser dimensions of the man. Désir (1844) breathes in contented dream before momentarily slipping into awakenment. Petit conte (1859), in love with virginal ornament, innocent of horror, is a graciously spun quasi-nocturne. Other works though, such as the Petites pièces, Op 60 (1859), or the two Fantasticheria (1867), typify what Viner calls ‘Alkan’s penchant for opposites’, while high-voltage precision fingerwork is required in the neo-Baroque Toccatina (1872), Quasi-Caccia caprice, Op 53 (1859), and, a favourite of Egon Petri, Le chemin de fer (1844; Paris’s first train station, Saint-Lazare, opened in 1837, Austerlitz and Montparnasse in 1840) – this last a dynamite étude of unforgiving demand and every possibility of derailment. Viner thinks of it as likely ‘the first example of mechanised music [intrinsically] unique in music history’. His account scorches, taking us on a semiquaver-rattling journey through rubbled countryside, dazzling bursts of Straussian sunrise and craggy landscape before the calm of arrival. At five minutes he comes close to the composer’s all but suicidal minim=112 optimum.

Different voices, intricately weighted, take over the three Petites fantaisies, Op 41 (1859), exceptional in Alkan’s catalogue, Viner says, ‘for their dry humour, whimsical character and brilliant, explosive energy’. Graphic mood-painting vitalises the Op 50 scènes de guerre poems (1859), Viner’s palette, touch and cinematic angling brilliantly gripping the imagination. ‘Drums, clarions, leaving the grave, go back and forth’ … ‘A bugle player’s melancholy call is heard in the distance … flags sway at half-mast in the gunpowder-laden air’. Two first recordings are included. Offsetting its Voltairean companion Jean qui pleur, gravely profiled, Jean qui rit (1840) – a fughe da camera drawing on (reining in) the champagne aria from Don Giovanni – begins deceptively before plunging into vintage Alkanesque waters and perilous sonorities. Pour Monsieur Gurkhaus (1863) is a plain-speaking canonic exercise in G major, ‘looping back on itself ad infinitum’. Upfront Dutch production. Comprehensive documentation, of an affinity and depth one hopes Viner might develop into a book.

Ateş Orga

Chopin Piano Sonatas – No 2, Op 35; No 3, Op 58

Rachmaninov Variations on a Theme of Chopin, Op 22

Peter Donohoe pf

Somm SOMMCD0679

Following Rachmaninov’s Variations on a Theme of Chopin with Chopin’s Second and Third Piano Sonatas is illuminating. The Variations are a heartfelt tribute to Chopin and make a refreshing change from the more widely played Corelli set, and although uneven in quality are of an indelible character and intricacy. Based on the C minor Prelude from Chopin’s Op 28, a moving austerity provides an ideal foundation for Rachmaninov’s kaleidoscope of endlessly shifting patterns and ideas, and Donohoe’s grand and imperious opening looks ahead to the essential nature of his performance. Clear-sighted, as honest as the day and without fuss or idiosyncrasy, he gives you what is on the page, and so much more. Others may be more heated, more intent on dazzle, but Donohoe is as eloquent as he is masterly.

Donohoe’s Chopin possesses the same virtues, his clarity and coherence creating their own distinctive musical ambience. In the first-movement repeat of the Second Sonata he returns us to the opening Grave rather than the following Doppio movimento, in accordance with an early edition, and in the second-movement Scherzo his punishing weight of sound is a reminder that with few exceptions Chopin’s scherzos are far from jocular. Again, unlike other more elaborate presentations, he cuts unerringly to the musical quick; frills and flights of fancy he leaves to others. He is imperturbably direct in the Funeral March, and is growling and no less defiant in the sotto voce finale, a nightmarish enigma that has spawned widely varying interpretations.

Once more, in the Third Sonata, Donohoe’s focus and trenchancy lend an almost symphonic weight to Chopin’s argument. Characteristically, he counters James Huneker’s view that the Scherzo is ‘as light as a hair-bell’, and his shifts of tempos and dynamics in the Largo are made all the more effective when they are so sparingly applied. The finale’s equestrian gallop is thrilling, with an unflinching drive to the triumphal end.

Chopin-playing of such honesty and dignity is rare, Somm’s sound is of demonstration quality and Marina Frolova-Walker’s detailed accompanying essay is a special bonus.

Bryce Morrison

Debussy Nocturnes (arr Ravel)

Milhaud Scaramouche, Op 165b

Poulenc Caprice (d’après La bal masqué). L’embarquement pour Cythère. Élégie. Sonata for Piano Duet. Sonata for Two Pianos

Katya Apekisheva, Charles Owen pf/pfs

Orchid ORC100270

Charles Owen and Katya Apekisheva dive full blast into Scaramouche’s exuberant outer movements while creating meaningful and expressive contrasts in voicing and timbre, especially when themes repeat and reiterate. The Modéré central movement sings out eloquently without the basic pulse sagging as it tends to do in other performances. The duo’s synchronicity in Poulenc’s Caprice operates at full capacity, from the brash unison passages to the middle section’s veiled chords and everything in between. They bring uncommon textural lightness and variety to Poulenc’s four-hand Sonata: for instance, the first movement’s motoric secondo accompaniments are scaled down to size in order for the quirky melodic accents to hit home. Balances between tunes and decorative trills ideally convey the second movement’s ‘Rustique’ ambience, and listen to that unexpected quiet ending, timed to a proverbial T.

Notice, too, the pianists’ beautiful dynamic gradations in the full-bodied legato chords of Poulenc’s Élégie for two pianos, which can sound cluttered in the wrong hands. Poulenc’s witty and imaginative Sonata for Two Pianos also receives a supple and contrapuntally astute interpretation. Owen and Apekisheva also play up the giddy little L’émbarquement pour Cythère, waltzing without schmaltzing, so to speak.

In Debussy’s Nocturnes, the duo’s strong rhythmic centre and astute sense of clarifying foreground/background material impart uncommon fibre throughout ‘Nuages’, helped by a tempo that’s considerably faster than most orchestral performances. An ever-so-slight accelerando leading into the central march episode of ‘Fêtes’ allows this section to seemingly commence from nothing, an effect that only enhances the music’s inherent drama. The pianists must have read that possibly apocryphal textbook 1001 Ways to Shape and Shade Tremolos, judging from how they keep the potentially diffuse ‘Sirènes’ afloat, not to mention their conversational repartee. In short, vibrant, dazzling performances, superbly engineered.

Jed Distler