With this second and concluding volume Murray McLachlan's Miaskovsky cycle moves into a category beyond that of the 'useful survey'. The difference from the first issue, which I reviewed in December, is not in the playing—which is as intelligent and competent as before—or in the recording—again acceptable, despite an instrument with the tinny top octave so common in recent concert grands. The difference is simply that the Fourth Sonata is at least, by my reckoning, easily the finest of the six.
It happens to be the most 'modern', too, capturing the idealistic fervour of the early Soviet era in an astringent idiom coloured by Scriabin, Prokofiev, and even, I would say, the Bartok of the Allegro barbaro and the 1916 Suite. But modernism isn't the whole story, especially not in the slow middle movement, whose main idea is borrowed from the Astrologer's music in Rimsky-Korsakov's The Golden Cockerel. It's the way the temperature of the ideas is kept up that is so impressive, whether in the volcanic stirrings of the first movement, or the melancholy chromaticism of the second (shades of Shostakovich's First Symphony, an exact contemporary, at one point) or the extravagant virtuosity of the finale. And this also distinguishes it from the other sonatas, which tend to go off the boil all too soon or whose ideas may be distinctly lukewarm to start with.
The E minor Sonatine and the Fifth Sonata rather fall into that category, I fear, despite attractive whiffs of Ravel in the former and of the French cabaret-waltz in the latter. The Fifth Sonata is actually a student piece, dating from 1907 but revised much later; the Sonatine was composed in 1942, but bears no conspicuous trace of wartime experiences. However, I know that others find Miaskovsky's wistful vein more rewarding than I do, and there is certainly every evidence of sympathetic feeling in these interpretations.
In conclusion then, a large bouquet for Olympia—this is precisely the kind of enterprise that young artists and small companies should be encouraged to pursue. McLachlan mentions van Dieren in his sleeve-note to the intense Prelude, Op. 58—a hint of more rarities to come?'