Piano Rarities – Vol. 3: Transcriptions
see end of review for track listing
Cyprien Katsaris (piano)
rec. March 2009, Tonstudio Teije van Geest, Heidelberg, Germany
PIANO 21 P21 045-N [79:37]
Cyprien Katsaris has always been a pianist who follows his curiosity wherever it leads — into corners of the repertoire that most of his colleagues walk right past. This disc, devoted to piano transcriptions of Slavic orchestral and vocal music, is exactly the kind of project only he would undertake, and probably only he could bring off.
The program divides, more or less naturally, between Khachaturian and everyone else. The Khachaturian pieces come first, and they’re remarkable. The “Sabre Dance” — a piece I’d long since written off as a warhorse fit only for television variety shows — turns out to be genuinely exciting in Lev Soline’s transcription, which finds ways to suggest the original’s percussive ferocity without reducing the piano to a punching bag. The famous “Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia” moves faster here than you might expect, but Katsaris understands that on the piano you can’t sustain the way strings can, and he compensates with an urgency that keeps the love theme from going slack. The Gayaneh Lullaby, in Oscar Levant’s arrangement — yes, that Oscar Levant — is simply beautiful.
Then the program opens up.
Vladimir Leyetchkiss’s reduction of the Suite for Two Pianos No. 2, Op. 17 is, frankly, astonishing. Rachmaninoff conceived this music for two players at two instruments, with all the sonic mass that implies — the big resonances, the interweaving inner voices, the sheer physical weight of four hands across two keyboards. Somehow Leyetchkiss has compressed all of that into ten fingers, and Katsaris plays it with such complete command that you keep waiting for the second pianist to enter. He never does. Georg Kirkor’s arrangement of the slow movement from the Second Symphony is more modest in its ambitions but no less effective for that — the long Adagio melody, one of the most achingly luminous things Rachmaninoff ever wrote, comes through with very little lost in translation.
Felix Blumenfeld’s arrangement of a single Polovtsian Dance from Prince Igor left me wanting the whole set.
The disc closes with a sequence of song transcriptions — encores, essentially, and they function that way, winding things down with intimacy and grace. Karol Miłosz Karlowicz’s “Dla zasmuconej” (“To a grieving maiden”), in a transcription by Karol A. Penson, stopped me cold. There’s a quality of suspended grief in it that Katsaris renders with extraordinary delicacy — the kind of playing where you notice the silences as much as the notes. Eduard Schütt’s arrangement of Dvořák’s “Songs My Mother Taught Me” is affecting in a quieter way, never oversentimental, which is harder to pull off than it sounds.
The engineering is close and warm — Hyperion-ish, if that means anything to you — with one puzzling exception: the Karlowicz track has a slightly different acoustic character, as if it were recorded on a different day in a different room. A minor irritant in an otherwise well-produced disc.
Pianophiles will need no further encouragement. But here’s what I’d say to everyone else: transcriptions like these aren’t just curiosities or party tricks. At their best — and several of these are at their best — they’re a different way of hearing music you thought you already knew. Katsaris makes that case as persuasively as anyone alive.
