Mussorgsky Pictures and Schubert Sonata – Alice Sara Ott

The White Nights sun never really sets on St. Petersburg in June, and something of that pale, insomniac glow seems to have gotten into Alice Sara Ott’s playing on this live document. It’s an odd, faintly hallucinatory context for Pictures at an Exhibition — already a work about walking through a gallery of a dead friend’s imagination, already haunted — and Ott doesn’t try to tidy that strangeness away.

Does the world need another Pictures? No. It has needed one since roughly the moment Horowitz got his hands on it. Richter’s mono Sofia release from 1958 remains, for all its congested engineering, a kind of moral standard: those bell tones in “The Great Gate of Kiev” arrive like a verdict, not a decoration. Pogorelich, on his old DG account, gives you a fascinating, willful, occasionally infuriating fantasia on Mussorgsky’s themes, more séance than performance. Ashkenazy, pianist and later orchestrator-director both, remains the dependable colorist, never losing sight of the score’s peasant grit under all that Romantic finish. Against this company Ott doesn’t need to win. She needs only to be herself. Mostly, she is.

Her Promenade sets out unhurried, weighted, no false grandeur in the opening octaves. Good, because too many pianists turn this into a fanfare before they’ve even entered the museum. “Gnomus” then snaps at you: real menace, a snarl in the bass suggesting she’s been listening past the printed dynamics to something closer to Mussorgsky’s own damaged, visionary harmonic language than any smoothed-over Rimsky-Korsakov filter. “The Old Castle” sings with an unforced, slightly veiled tone. No lingering, no perfumed rubato. Just a troubadour’s melancholy that knows better than to overstay.

“Tuileries” has mischief in it, yes, but also an undercurrent of something less innocent than mere children’s games. You sense Ott hears the sardonic Mussorgsky lurking behind the picturesque one. Then “Bydlo” arrives like a hammer: pesante indeed, ox-cart wheels grinding under enormous hands, and the pianissimo return of the Promenade afterward lands with real shock, the contrast almost brutal in its effectiveness. “Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks” chatters convincingly, feathery and absurd. The “Two Jews” — Samuel Goldenberg blustering, Schmuÿle wheedling — come off with genuine dramatic differentiation rather than the cartoonish oppositions some pianists settle for.

“Limoges” bustles, gossips, practically talks over itself. Then “Catacombs” drops us, without warning, into that terminal Lisztian blackness, the kind of harmonic abyss that makes you understand why Mussorgsky, dead at forty-two of drink and grief, could write music that still sounds like it’s staring into something the rest of the repertoire looks away from.

The Schubert companion piece, the Sonata in D major, D. 850, is a curious pairing on paper but makes sense in the concert hall: music of similar expansiveness, similar willingness to wander before it arrives anywhere. Written in the giddy aftermath of the Gastein excursion of 1825, this sonata often gets dismissed as note-spinning, all those long paragraphs that seem reluctant to end. Ott doesn’t rush to fix that quality; she leans into it, particularly in the first movement, where the con delicatezza marking gets taken almost literally — fleet, pearly, occasionally underpowered where a firmer bass line might have anchored things. The scherzo has real wit. The slow movement occasionally drifts toward the merely pretty rather than the profound. This is where a Brendel or a Kempff finds ambiguity and shadow that Ott, live and in the moment, doesn’t quite locate.

Sound quality: decent, boxy in spots, with the inevitable coughs and creaking chair of the genuine concert experience. No editing-room sterility here, for better and occasionally for worse. Ott has spoken, in interviews accompanying this release, about wanting to “send feelings into the audience and receive feelings back,” about the liberation of “ideal conditions.” One can be forgiven a raised eyebrow at such language on the page. But sitting with the recording, you believe her more than expected. There is a spontaneity here, an unbuttoned quality, that studio perfectionism tends to iron out.

Is this a first choice? No. Richter and Ashkenazy still stand where they’ve always stood, and this newcomer doesn’t dislodge them. But as a document of a gifted, still-developing artist encountering Mussorgsky’s ghosts on his home ground, under the pale unsettled light of a St. Petersburg June, it has its own modest claim on your attention. Recommended with real, if qualified, enthusiasm.