Here is a recital lovingly planned to tickle even the most jaded palette, to provoke all puritans and Malvolios (“dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”). Familiar and unfamiliar transcriptions jostle for attention and culminate in the grandest of grand finales, one where previously heard material resurfaces in a truly uproarious display. Schulz-Evler’s introduction sends fabulous spangles of sound spinning through the air and Rosenthal’s mock-canonic start to his Carnaval de Vienne evolves into a crazy course of events.
All these works, including Friedman’s much less well-known Fruhlingsstimmen pose some near insuperable problems, even for those blessed with Piers Lane’s enviable energy and facility. Somehow the pianist has to create an illusion of effortlessness, a nonchalant capacity to juggle four, five and six jewelled batons simultaneously. Then, and only then, is he free to explore with the most lavish variety of colour and nuance the evocative Viennese memories lingering beneath so much incessant surface activity. Fancifully speaking, Lane leaps rather than glides across the dance floor, revelling in the kaleidoscopic configurations of Friedman’s Fruhlingsstimmen and whirling Rosenthal’s final fantasy into a virtuoso vortex; you can almost hear an audience’s roar of approval at the end.
What I occasionally missed was an elegance inseparable from such music, the sort of rhetoric or quality that came more easily to pianists of the past. Rachmaninov and Moiseiwitsch are obvious names, and so is Jorge Bolet, whose regal thunder in three of the items chosen for this recital can be heard on his legendary 1975 Carnegie Hall programme (RCA – nla). Cherkassky and Earl Wild are two others whose performances in such repertoire suggest only the most witty and aristocratic dimensions. But if Lane is sometimes happier in athleticism than lyricism his record will still set virtuoso fanciers by the ears. The recordings are excellent, though the front cover of Toulouse-Lautrec’s Ball at the Moulin Rouge seems an odd choice for a recital so intimately connected with Vienna.'