Behzod Abduraimov is not a name that needs much defending anymore. The Uzbek-born pianist, who studied with Dmitri Bashkirov in Madrid and announced himself to the wider world with a jaw-dropping Prokofiev Third at the 2009 Leeds Competition, has steadily built a reputation for pianism of exceptional clarity and formidable range. This new Alpha release, recorded at Berlin’s Teldex Studio, confirms what his admirers have been insisting for years — that here is an artist of genuine intellectual seriousness, not merely a fingers-first technician.
The album is called Inferno. Whether that title earns its keep is a fair question. Liszt’s Après une lecture de Dante: Fantasia quasi Sonata is obviously the anchor, and obviously the justification — but the rest of the program doesn’t exactly reek of brimstone.
Start with the Czerny. Carl Czerny is a name that makes pianists of a certain age flinch involuntarily, summoning memories of finger exercises and the metronome’s tyranny. But Czerny was Beethoven’s student and Liszt’s teacher, and the pedagogical industry that swallowed his reputation whole left behind a substantial composer who wrote, by his own perhaps unreliable count, over a thousand works. The Variations on a Theme by Rode, La Ricordanza, draws on a melody by Pierre Rode — the French violinist whose G minor violin concerto once packed concert halls and whose name now appears mainly in footnotes. What Czerny does with it is quietly astonishing. The theme itself is restrained, almost reticent, and the variations that follow build their brilliance incrementally — not through bluster but through a kind of patient accumulation that suggests Czerny had learned something from Beethoven about long-range formal thinking.
Abduraimov plays it with a pearly, even tone and an elegant sense of proportion. He resists the temptation — always present in variation form — to treat each variation as a separate display opportunity, and instead shapes the whole thing as a single unfolding argument. The passage work sparkles without clattering. The ornaments land cleanly. And when the music finally opens up into its more extroverted moments, the effect is genuinely earned.
Then comes Liszt. Après une lecture de Dante — the “Dante Sonata,” as everyone calls it, though Liszt never did — is one of the great white whales of the piano repertoire. It runs roughly seventeen minutes and demands everything: octave storms that could loosen your fillings, a left hand that has to sustain bass lines while also managing independent melodic voices, a right hand that occasionally needs to be in three places at once. Walter Beckett, in the old Master Musicians volume, called it “rather impractical” — which is rather like calling the Matterhorn a challenging walk. The technical demands are only the beginning. The real problem is musical: how do you keep something this episodic from flying apart?
Liszt’s solution — and it is a sophisticated one — was thematic transformation. A handful of core motifs, chief among them the tritone (the diabolus in musica of medieval theory), metamorphose across the piece’s arc, reappearing in new harmonic and rhythmic contexts. The “infernal” opening material — chromatic, destabilized, violent — gradually gives way to a luminous second theme that represents, in the poem’s terms, Beatrice: the light that leads Dante out of darkness. The piece ends not in triumph exactly but in something more ambiguous — a transfiguration that feels hard-won, even fragile.
Abduraimov navigates this with remarkable structural intelligence. His tritone-driven opening passages have real menace — the low-register tremolos carry genuine physical weight, the kind that makes the piano’s sustain pedal vibrate in your sternum. But he doesn’t linger in the infernal for effect. He moves. The transitions between sections feel inevitable rather than arbitrary, and that is no small achievement in a piece where lesser pianists leave you checking your watch around the midpoint. His Beatrice theme is luminous without being sentimental, played with a slight forward lean in the tempo that keeps it from curdling into prettiness. The coda — and this is where recordings of the Dante Sonata most often disappoint — arrives with a sense of genuine catharsis rather than mere athletic conclusion. Horowitz’s 1976 Carnegie Hall disc remains the benchmark for sheer incandescence; Arrau’s thoughtfulness still compels; Brendel brought a philosophical weight that could border on the ponderous. Abduraimov is closer to Brendel in temperament but faster on his feet.
The Debussy Suite bergamasque is trickier than it looks, which is precisely why it so often sounds exactly as easy as it looks — and therefore thin. The three movements that frame “Clair de lune” — the “Prélude,” “Menuet,” and “Passepied” — are Debussy’s attempt to write something in the spirit of the French Baroque while already hearing through it toward something new. The pedaling has to be judged to the millimeter; too much and the textures cloud, too little and the music loses its atmosphere of suspended time. Abduraimov finds the balance almost perfectly in the “Prélude” and “Passepied,” where his light, flexible articulation lets the Baroque ghost show through without ever becoming archaic. “Clair de lune” itself — and yes, it is a lollipop, but a great one — he plays with a natural, breathing rubato that never tips into indulgence.
Is Inferno the right title? Probably not, or at least not quite. But the album it names is very good indeed — carefully programmed, beautifully played, and recorded with a presence that puts you squarely in the room. Abduraimov is an artist worth following closely.
