Circus & Magic
Ernest BLOCH (1880-1959)
The Two “Burlington” Brothers [2:51]
The Clown [2:39]
The Homeliest Woman [2:10]
Dialogue and Dance of the Heavyweight and the Dwarf [3:02]
Claude DEBUSSY (1862-1918)
Masques (1904) [4:54]
La Cathédrale Engloutie (from Preludes, Book I) (1910) [6:27]
Feux D’Artifice (from Preludes, Book II) (1913) [4:36]
Sergei PROKOFIEV (1891-1953)
Three Pieces from Cinderella Op.95 (1942):
Intermezzo [3:02]
Gavotte [2:44]
Slow Waltz [5:16]
Gyorgy LIGETI (1923-2006)
Der Zauberlehrling (No.10 from Etudes) (1994) [2:32]
Igor STRAVINSKY (1882-1971)
Three movements from Petrushka (1911):
Russian Dance [2:43]
In Petrushka’s Cell [4:49]
The Shrovetide Fair [8:55]
Reinis Zarins (piano)
rec. Music Room, Champs Hill, East Sussex, UK, 19-21 June 2012
CHAMPS HILL RECORDS CHRCD048 [56:50]
The title Circus & Magic is one of those organizing ideas that seems obvious only after someone else has thought of it — and it works, not just as a marketing conceit but as a genuine aesthetic argument. Short piano pieces, many of them rarely played, gathered under a single imaginative umbrella. The Latvian pianist Reinis Zarins has built something coherent from what might otherwise feel like a miscellany.
Start with the Bloch. These four character sketches — still unpublished, Zarins tells us, nearly a century after they were written — are a genuine find, and hearing them you wonder, with some exasperation, why they’ve been sitting in a drawer. Bloch knew exactly what he was doing here: the humor is dry and precise, the timing almost theatrical. Zarins plays them with the kind of internal silence that most pianists never find, those pauses that land exactly where they need to, the dynamic shading never overdone. Goodbye to them comes too soon.
Then Debussy. It always does.
Masques doesn’t get played nearly enough — overshadowed, perpetually, by the Préludes and the Images — and there’s real substance to it, passages of genuine delicacy alongside moments where Debussy suddenly leans into the keys with an almost physical weight. Zarins hears both sides of that. But the test — my test, anyway, for any pianist claiming Debussy credentials — is La cathédrale engloutie. I’ve been using that piece as a diagnostic tool for thirty years. The wrong pianist makes it merely grand. The right one makes you feel the water. Zarins feels the water. His is a reading of genuine mystery, the sonority rising from somewhere deep in the instrument’s chest, grandeur and strangeness held in a kind of suspension. “Wondrous amazement,” he writes in his notes — a phrase that could easily embarrass itself in print. Here it doesn’t. “Feux d’artifice” is another matter entirely: this is Debussy at his most extrovert, and Zarins ignites it properly, the smoldering before the explosions, the shooting-star trajectories, the dying fall at the end with its distant echo of the Marseillaise. Dazzling.
Three pieces from Prokofiev’s Cinderella follow, and Zarins navigates that particular sound-world — mercurial, ironically tender, rhythmically tricky — with easy command.
The Ligeti étude was new to me, and I’m not ashamed to say so. A revelation, actually. Whatever it was — and I’ll be seeking out the rest of his piano music now, having apparently been negligent — it made the Dukas that presumably flanks it on the program feel like furniture. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is not a piece that needs more performances.
Save the best for last. Stravinsky’s three movements from Petrushka — arranged, at Rubinstein’s request, though their relationship over the matter grew famously contentious — represents a special case in the piano literature. Stravinsky himself, by his own admission, couldn’t play it. The texture is relentless: rapid alternations of fortissimo and pianissimo that would exhaust a lesser technician within the first page. Zarins makes it sound not easy, exactly, but inevitable — which is harder. Every color in that orchestral original finds its piano equivalent, the fairground energy, the puppet’s pathos, the violent crowd scenes. The reading is fabulously, almost recklessly exciting.
This is a disc with genuine purpose and a pianist worth knowing.
