Few debut discs have been more energetically promoted. Described in the accompanying booklet as ''one of Russia's best kept musical secrets'' Mikhail Kazakevich is a 35-year-old pianist with a penchant, one assumes, for the ebb and flow of Schumann's romanticism. Alas, the easy majority of these performances are so lacklustre and devitalized that one has little sense of what the note nicely describes as the composer's ''alternate bliss and anguish''. Where is the glow and ardour at the centre of the second Intermezzo, part of a strangely neglected cycle alive with all of Schumann's early song and caprice? And how I missed just a touch of heart's ease in the alternative, l'istesso tempo of No. 5. Even in No. 6 (a gift, I would have thought, for so nimble-fingered a pianist) where Schumann expands his opening flight into a romantic yearning peculiarly his own, Kazakevich shows little beyond a token involvement.
On more familiar ground, in the Etudes symphoniques, Kazakevich has a very pedestrian sense of the composer's espressivo in No. 2 and a distinctly lethargic way with the sempre vivacissimo of No. 5. The posthumous etudes, played as a sequence of 2, 3, 4, 5, 1, are sandwiched between the sixth and seventh etudes though the notes make no mention of the curious edition used in No. 5. The darkly brooding and impassioned penultimate etude is given with little sense of mystery or occasion and so one turns with relief to a more successful performance of the G minor Sonata. Here, at last, Kazakevich, while hardly acute, comes alive with an assured sense of the first movement's helter-skelter of events (''as fast as possible'', ''faster'' and ''still faster'', urges Schumann) and of the finale's mercurial flight. The Toccata, too, is exceptionally light-fingered with enough fanciful touches to keep even aficionados of this treacherous double-note piece on the qui vivre. But such quality comes too late to redeem some sadly disengaged performances. The recordings are close and airless and so there is clearly no competition for Cortot and Perahia (ancient and modern) in the Etudes symphoniques, or for Argerich or Berezovsky in the Sonata. Berezovsky's recent recording of the Toccata is also superior, but for the Intermezzos you will have to stretch back to the early days of LPs to find, in Grant Johannesen (Nixa, 2/55—nla) an interpreter sufficiently alive to Schumann's fantasy and freedom.'