According to the current Classical Catalogue Prokofiev's two best-known piano concertos are not otherwise available on one disc. Put them together with his best-known sonata and you have the makings of an unusually attractive issue. Add conducting of unerring idiomatic flair and piano playing of a distinctive sensitivity, and you have something rather special.
Mari Kodama's tone is beautifully shaded and she makes a lovely liquid sound—a little shallow, in the best French tradition (she studied at the Paris Conservatoire). The echoes and inner conversations she finds near the beginning of the Third Concerto's middle movement are one example among many of the care she has lavished on these works. Her technique is feline rather than leonine, perhaps, and when Prokofiev's tuttis are in full spate she has some difficulty making herself heard; elsewhere she sometimes plays with the exaggerated discretion of an orchestral celesta. Yet such is her sensitivity to light and shade, and so refined her shaping of texture, that the occasional lack of power hardly seems to matter.
Even more treasurable is Nagano's handling of the accompaniment. Time after time he allows the Philharmonia to savour Prokofiev's harmonies and timbres as they have never been savoured before (never in my experience, that is). There is the same kind of revelation of internal balance and perspective which the best early instrument performances have brought to Mozart. Nagano and Kodama are husband and wife, and the reciprocity of solo and accompaniment is beautifully worked out (come to think of it, the two things don't necessarily go together). Some may wish that she had asserted her conjugal rights more vigorously, but her willingness to play in a concertante manner proves the natural counterpart of Nagano's animation of orchestral textures. It's not just knowledge of the latter's 1990 Gramophone Award that brings to mind the frothy theatricality of The love for three oranges. It all adds up to a genuinely fresh, and refreshing, view—not a comprehensive one (whatever that may be), but one to be enjoyed on its own terms and heard alongside the very best.
Finesse, polish and elegance are again the virtues of Mari Kodama in the Seventh Sonata. It may well be argued that it is not that kind of piece, but it is interesting to see how much of it works this way. For me the first movement, crisp and unflustered, comes off best. The yielding rubato at the beginning of the slow movement is, however, just what it can do without, since it makes a nonsense of the pain which is at the movement's heart. The bouncing chords of the finale are a bit spongy too, much as I applaud the refusal to smother the movement in reckless bravura.
Occasional faint rumbles of traffic noise and rhythmical hammering accompany the quieter passages in the concertos. But that won't stop me from hailing the recording quality as superlative—for its combined spaciousness, definition and warmth.'