Balakirev Piano Sonatas – Walker and Hirose

Mily Balakirev has always suffered the fate of being someone else’s footnote — the stern taskmaster who browbeat Mussorgsky, bullied Rimsky-Korsakov into orchestration, and then vanished for a decade into religious mania and a job checking railway timetables. History remembers him as the glue that held together The Five, rarely as a composer in his own right. This new disc from Grand Piano, the first installment of a complete survey of his solo piano music played by Nicholas Walker, ought to go some distance toward correcting that.

Three sonatas, not one. This alone is worth the price of admission, since the received wisdom — repeated on disc after disc, including a 2012 Mirare release by Etsuko Hirose billed flatly as “Balakirev’s only sonata” — turns out to be simply wrong. All three works share the same key, B flat minor, a fact that has evidently misled generations of annotators into assuming some kind of single evolving entity, a Bruckner-esque sequence of revisions. Nothing could be further from the truth. These are three distinct sonatas, composed across a fifty-year span, and the differences between them are not cosmetic.

The Grande Sonate, op. 3, dates from 1855 — Balakirev not yet twenty, newly arrived in St. Petersburg and still finding his feet under Glinka’s shadow. It breaks off suddenly, almost mid-thought, and Walker’s booklet note explains why (a fire, apparently, consumed the only continuation, though details remain murky even now). What we get here is the work’s first-ever disc, a genuine premiere a century and a half after the fact, which is itself a small miracle of archival persistence. The music is discursive, not fully settled into its own skin — long Lisztian paragraphs that don’t quite resolve, a harmonic language still absorbing Chopin — but there are flashes, especially in the slow movement, of the melodic voice that would later flower in Islamey and the symphonic poem Tamara.

The First Sonata, op. 5, from the following year, is tighter, more confident, more obviously indebted to Schumann in its proportions. It doesn’t linger in the memory the way the late sonata does. But Walker plays it with real conviction — unshowy, clean in the voicing, alert to the inner lines that a lesser pianist would let blur into pedal haze.

It’s the 1905 sonata, though, that remains the calling card, the one work of Balakirev’s for solo piano with anything like a foothold in the repertoire — however precarious that foothold is. Here Walker has company: Hirose’s version is the obvious comparison, and the two pianists land within seconds of each other across all four movements, an odd convergence that suggests the score itself dictates tempo with unusual firmness. Walker’s reading has grit to it — the second movement mazurka has a slight catch in the rhythm, a rubato that feels earned rather than applied, and the finale’s fugal writing (Balakirev never quite escaped his contrapuntal study habits) comes through with real clarity rather than the murky scramble some pianists make of it.

Walker makes grand claims in his notes — he calls this sonata “the most original, wholly Russian, structurally successful and moving of all Russian sonatas,” setting it alongside Liszt’s B minor. That’s a claim I can’t quite sign onto. It discounts Scriabin at a stroke, to say nothing of Medtner, Myaskovsky, Prokofiev’s middle-period sonatas, even Mosolov in his wilder moments. Balakirev’s sonata is a fine piece — warmly Slavic, structurally more coherent than its reputation suggests, worth hearing repeatedly — but “comparable to Liszt” sets up an argument the music doesn’t quite need to win. It succeeds on its own, modest terms: a late-Romantic Russian sonata, backward-glancing even in 1905, Scriabin and the whole early-modernist wave already lapping at its edges.

Sound engineering here is clean, close without being airless, the piano captured with enough room tone to register pedal changes but not so much as to blur Walker’s articulation — a notable contrast, frankly, to the Mirare Hirose disc, which carries a persistent low-level electrical hiss audible under headphones, worst in the quiet hollows between phrases. Grand Piano’s engineers deserve credit for avoiding that trap entirely.

Three sonatas, then, where the catalogue insisted there was one. For that fact alone this disc earns its place on the shelf — and Walker’s playing, direct and unfussy, make the strongest possible case for music that still waits, patiently, for its history to catch up.