Taken live from his 1998 Carnegie Hall debut recital, Sony’s second Arcadi Volodos recital confirms a daunting legend. At 26 Volodos is unquestionably among the world’s master pianists, a virtuoso for whom even the most fiercely applied difficulties (Horowitz and, on his earlier disc – 10/97 – Cziffra transcriptions) simply do not exist. At the same time everything is given with an unfaltering sense of equilibrium; as fast as you marvel at one thing it is immediately counterpointed by another. His technique in, say, the Liszt Rhapsody and Wedding March Variations (the first of two encores) is stupendous but never at the expense of musical quality. His sonority can be as delicate as it is thunderous and full-blooded. His accuracy and taste are impeccable so that instead of celebrating something self-serving or rip-roaring you find yourself conscious of higher virtues, of rhythm that can be magically free or held in a vice-like grip, as well as an unequalled fluency and aplomb (the shoals of notes at 2'18'' in the Rhapsody). In Scriabin’s Tenth Sonata he is faithful to the composer’s obsessive and opalescent vision at every point, more than equal to even the most decadent and esoteric directions (tres douce et pur, avec une ardeur profonde et violee and cristallin, all within 11 bars). Less charged or manic than Horowitz’s celebrated performance (on a three-disc set, also from Sony at Carnegie Hall, in 1966) this performance carries its own authenticity. Volodos’s Rachmaninov, in his brief but gloriously enterprising selection, is played with the same magical sense of flux and clarity, and never more so than in the D minor Etude-tableau with its yearning and disconsolate double-note flow or in the C minor, posthumously published Etude-tableau, where one of the composer’s most heart’s-easing ideas blossoms from an elegy resonant with chiming funeral bells.
Yet if I were to choose just one item from this recital for my desert island, it would have to be Schumann’s Bunte Blatter, an audacious gathering with a graphic shift from the lighter to the darker side of romanticism (Nos. 1-8 and 9-14 respectively). Volodos’s reading of No. 1 is memorably mit Innigkeit; in No. 2 his playing is impetuous yet with every phrase precisely shaped and contoured, and he catches all of Schumann’s mordant wit as well as the music’s mysterious and desolating close in No. 14. You may hear a greater sense of Schumann’s fevered and tormented imagination in Richter’s legendary recording but the fact that you can so easily and unapologetically compare a pianist at the start of his career with one of the greatest artists of the century carries its own affirmation of pianistic and poetic genius.
Sony’s sound triumphs over difficult circumstances and if a teasing touch of enigma remains, both in performance and choice of repertoire, with an artist of this calibre you can hardly say that the golden age of pianism is dead.'