Cui: 25 Preludes for Piano, op. 64
Jeffrey Biegel, piano.
Naxos 8.555557. Recorded 1993. Reissue, 67:00.—César Cui. The name itself carries a faint whiff of the archive, the kind of composer you encounter in footnotes about the Mighty Handful and then quietly forget. He was, by most accounts—including those of people who admired him personally—the least gifted of that remarkable Russian quintet. The critic Richard Anthony put it with memorable brutality: “the poorest composer, the loudest talker.” Not an epitaph one would choose.
And yet here are these twenty-five preludes, op. 64, and they ask to be heard on their own terms.
Cui’s biography is genuinely strange. Son of a French officer stranded in Russia after Napoleon’s catastrophic 1812 campaign and a Lithuanian mother, he became a career military engineer—an authority on fortifications, no less—while composing on the side, writing criticism with considerable energy, and somehow attaching himself to Balakirev’s circle in St. Petersburg. The music came second, or perhaps third. This matters. It explains a great deal about the piano pieces: they have the quality of a cultivated amateur’s work, polished but not driven by any particular inner necessity.
The op. 64 preludes date from around the same years that Rachmaninoff was completing his op. 23 set and Scriabin was producing, with almost terrifying velocity, preludes opp. 31 through 39 and the Fourth Sonata. That comparison is not entirely fair to Cui—it’s a bit like standing a competent watercolorist next to Turner—but it does clarify what these pieces are and aren’t.
What they aren’t: harmonically adventurous. What they are: carefully, often beautifully organized.
Cui’s key scheme is worth pausing over. Rather than the circle-of-fifths logic that governs Chopin’s op. 28, or the alternating relative-minor relationships Scriabin favored, Cui pairs each major key with its mediant minor—C major with E minor, G major with B minor, and so on through the cycle, returning finally to C major. It sounds academic when described, but in practice it lends the sequence a quiet coherence, a sense of tonal rhyming, that makes the complete cycle more satisfying than any random selection of individual pieces.
And some of those individual pieces are genuinely lovely. The ninth prelude in E major—a piece of such unassuming melodic grace that you find yourself humming it afterward, slightly embarrassed. Several others have that quality Schumann achieved in his smaller piano pieces: the sense of a private world glimpsed through a half-open door. The stylistic debts are obvious. Chopin, Schumann, Rubinstein—these are the presiding spirits, not Scriabin or Rachmaninoff. But so what? The world of 1903 contained multitudes.
The more energetic preludes are less convincing. When Cui pushes toward anything resembling climax or dramatic weight, you feel the limitation immediately—not a failure of craft exactly, more an absence of that peculiar pressure that drives great music forward even when it doesn’t want to go. The marches feel dutiful. The studies feel like studies.
Jeffrey Biegel plays all of this with evident care and considerable sensitivity. In the quieter pieces especially—and this disc’s slightly close, hard acoustic is less of a problem there—he finds real intimacy, a genuine sense of music being discovered rather than performed. The brighter, more percussive passages expose the disc’s limitations more nakedly; the piano sound goes a bit brittle, boxlike, the tone losing its body at the top of the dynamic range. This is a reissue of a 1993 Marco Polo release, and it sounds like one.
But Biegel’s interpretive instincts are sound. He understands that this music cannot be bullied into significance, only coaxed into revealing what it actually contains. That is a real skill.
So. Are these preludes worth your time?
Yes—with eyes open. This is not a hidden masterpiece. Cui was a miniaturist of modest but genuine gifts, and the op. 64 set represents him at something close to his best. Heard as a complete cycle, with its careful tonal architecture providing a structural backbone the individual pieces couldn’t supply on their own, it adds up to something more than its parts suggest. Heard piecemeal, the weaker numbers drag.
What Cui offers, ultimately, is a certain quality of civilized, undemanding pleasure—music that asks nothing more than an attentive afternoon. There are worse things to ask.
