Recording Review #19: Four-Hand "Fun"

 

Schubert: Divertissement à la Hongroise, D. 818; Fantasie in F Minor, D. 940/Leonid Desyatnikov: Trompe-l'œil. Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy, piano. Harmonia Mundi HMM902716. 

I mean...the blurry cover kind of says it all: this is gonna be "daring," y'all. Like, totally set apart from other recordings of this repertoire. Totally. And did you get the "daring" part? This album is EDGY. Like, yeah. 

And that's a shame. Because apart from some shenanigans, there are stretches of fine playing here. Maybe not superlative playing, but very decent at times. (A bit more on this later.) So what are the shenanigans? Well, the performers occasionally place items on the piano strings to alter the sound and thereby evoke "the 'janissary' effects that certain period instruments were equipped to produce." This statement comes from the liner notes, which divulge similarly strange ideas about how they conceive of this music by Schubert. But yeah, seriously: my listening was intermittently jolted by George Crumb-like timbres right in the middle of a given passage when I wasn't expecting it. (Actually, after a while I was kind of expecting it...I guess that's the drawback of using shock tactics.) 

If that weren't bad enough, the listener gets assaulted with a composition by Leonid Desyatnikov, placed between the two Schubert works. This would be Trompe-l'œil, which consists of nothing but disembodied wisps from Schubert's Fantasie amidst a bunch of noise (including plenty of hyper-dissonant piano pounding). I kind of snort-chuckled not long in when I realized what it was all about. Then it kept going. After five minutes passed I muttered to myself, "when does this thing end, anyway?" I glanced at the time index. 20+ MINUTES OF THIS?? Just...why?? What for?? Schubert wrote a bunch of four-hand piano repertoire. And while almost none of it is on the level of the great Fantasie, most is nevertheless wonderful. Why not include a third such selection instead? You know, like pianists Zhu Xiao-Mei and Alexandre Tharaud do on their own HM recording of the Divertissement and Fantasie (HMC901773)? But I was forgetting: this newer album is AUDACIOUS, yo. Gotta flex that hip cred. Or something. 

Okay, stripping all of the nonsense away, what are we dealing with here? Like I said, there is some fine playing. I like Kolesnikov's and Tsoy's Divertissement à la Hongroise finale in particular, which most four-hand pianists play much too anemically. (By the way, if you don't know this piece already, go and listen to it ASAP! It's one of the many lesser-sung glories of Schubert's output.) I feel pep, and hear some wonderfully smooth, articulative playing both here and elsewhere. The biggest problem, apart from the afore-mentioned theatrics, is a love of rendering the soft parts TOO softly. It's very difficult to hear things properly in these places...especially in the Fantasie, unfortunately. 

All in all, I'd have to say that the positives don't justify tolerating everything else. There are some good recordings of the Divertissement, and many of the Fantasie (though I haven't yet heard one to match that of Murray Perahia and the late Radu Lupu on Sony SK 39511). Opt for some of those instead. They'll feature playing that's at least as good but without the pretension mixed in. 

Avoid