Prognosticating the future reputation of a composer, particularly one who died as recently as 30 years ago, is always risky. In my childhood, the name Dmitry Kabalevsky was a fixture on required repertoire lists for young pianists. Even today this highly decorated Soviet composer is most often thought of as the junior member of a trio, including Kodály and Orff, who devoted significant energies to musically educating the young. The indefatigable Michael Korstick is among those who feel that Kabalevsky deserves a fresh listen, if not a revaluation. Having recorded Kabalevsky’s works for piano and orchestra in 2012, Korstick now follows up with a disc devoted to the three sonatas and two of the rondos.

Korstick copes manfully with the problems the sonatas present, and there are many of them. The First Sonata is a student work, dating from 1927, Kabalevsky’s first year as a pupil of Myaskovsky. Here the extreme tempos required in the outer movements make almost any attempt to clarify the dense textures an exercise in futility. But an even greater problem with all three works is their failure to achieve an original voice. Scriabin and Rachmaninov seem to lurk behind the First Sonata and the Second, from 1945, recalls Heinrich Neuhaus’s description of Kabalevsky as the ‘poor man’s Prokofiev’. While the Third Sonata achieves greater stylistic cohesion, one is reminded that, even though a handful of pianists outside the Soviet Union played the Second and Third Sonatas soon after their publication, Moiseiwitsch and Horowitz among them, they have failed to gain a foothold in the repertory.

The two rondos find Kabalevsky in more congenial waters. Op 59 was the commissioned work for the 1958 Tchaikovsky Competition which catapulted Cliburn to fame, while the Recitative and Rondo dates from 1967. Korstick’s virtuoso performances of both are the highlights of the disc.