After putting this in my player, I have simply not been able to stop listening to this recording - surely the mark of a top quality disc!

This is my first exposure to Yevgeny Sudbin and it will certainly not be my last. At only 25 he provides stunningly assured playing, both musically and technically. Not only that, but Sudbin himself provides some of the most detailed and illuminating notes on the music covered here that I've seen.

It is fascinating to compare Sudbin's playing to both Kreisler (composer) and Rachmaninov (transcriber) in the Liebesleid/Liebesfreud. These are left as encores to the main body of the disc, the Chopin variations and Sudbin's own conflation of Rachmaninov's 2nd piano sonata which includes some but not all of the revisions that Horowitz made (which were sanctioned by Rachmaninov). And what encores they are, the Liebeslied at once coquettish and capricious, the Liebeslied full of youthful joy. Kriesler I am sure would have approved of the singing lines that Sudbin brings to these minatures. Stylistically, they are at one with the conception of both composer (closest to Kreisler's 1942 RCA recording with orchestra) and transcriber, at once song-like and playful, though naturally one can hear the piano without a veil of hiss and crackles!

The disc opens with the all too rarely heard Chopin variations; all but the fugal variation XII and the coda are played here (omitted as the coda "destroys the tranquil atmosphere of the previous meno mosso section" according to Sudbin). The playing is glorious, with depth of sonority and brilliant passage work as the work demands and completely marries the potentially disparate sections of this marvellous work which has a similar range of melodic and harmonic travels to the Paganini Rhapsody.

The other transcriptions that seperate the Variations from the other major work, the 2nd Piano Sonata, here are Lilacs and Daisies from Rachmaninov (composer and transcriber) and again are given fully sympathetic performances whose virtuosity attracts your attention to the music not the player.

Finally, the sonata receives a thunderous performance with deep, turbulent rumbles emanating from Sudbin's Steinway D. Very passionate playing and thoroughly alive to both the letter and spirit of the music. Despite the demands that this music makes on the player, at no time do you hear the sound becoming anything less than rich. A very poetic but dramatic performance.

All this good work could have been undermined by a less than perfect recording but it is pleasing that with such a notoriously difficult instrument that BIS have done Rachmaninov and Sudbin proud. The image is well focused and the accoustic is completely believable. Some of the best piano sound (if not *the* best) I have ever heard on disc.

Highly recommended - go out and buy it!

(Purchased)

Copyright © 2005 John Broggio and HRAudio.net

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