Arensky Piano Suites for Two Pianos on CPO

Anton Arensky occupies one of those peculiar positions in musical history — perpetually described as a lesser talent, perpetually enjoyable, perpetually underestimated. His teachers included Rimsky-Korsakov. His students included Rachmaninoff and Scriabin. He died at forty-four, of tuberculosis, having drunk himself most of the way there. None of this biographical color quite explains why his music sounds the way it does — which is to say, elegant, fleet, emotionally direct, and stubbornly resistant to easy national categorization.

The five suites for two pianos gathered on this CPO release constitute a considerable portion of his legacy, and a slightly complicated one. Only four of them were actually composed for two pianos; the fifth, the Children’s Suite, op. 65, was written for four hands at a single keyboard — a distinction that matters both practically and sonically, and that the disc’s packaging handles with characteristic vagueness. Aglika Genova and Liuben Dimitrov are Bulgarians who have recorded for CPO before, and one assumes they are playing all five works on two instruments as advertised, though the booklet, in the way of CPO booklets everywhere, manages to muddy rather than clarify the question.

None of which should distract from what’s actually in the music.

Arensky rarely sounds Russian. This is strange, given the company he kept, but there it is. Tchaikovsky is somewhere in the vicinity — you can feel his gravitational pull in certain harmonic progressions, in the way a melody will suddenly deepen into minor-mode melancholy — but the dominant flavor across these suites is French. Saint-Saëns comes to mind immediately, that same combination of craft and charm, intellectual agility wrapped in a surface that never asks you to work too hard. And in the Fourth Suite particularly, the ghost of Chopin hovers with surprising insistence — the piano writing has that quality of rippling, inexhaustible figuration that makes a technical challenge feel inevitable rather than imposed.

The Third Suite — the Variations, op. 33 — is the most substantial piece here, nearly twenty-six minutes of music that reveals Arensky at his most inventive. The theme is given out simply enough, but what follows is a succession of character variations that manages to be genuinely surprising without ever becoming willfully eccentric. Genova and Dimitrov move through them with real intelligence, calibrating the dynamic balance between the two instruments with a care that pays off particularly in the quieter variations, where the texture thins to something almost chamber-like in its intimacy.

Assertive is the right word for this pair. They play with conviction and a degree of forward momentum that suits the music well, though occasionally one wishes for a slightly more ruminative approach in the slower passages of the Silhouettes suite — that second suite carries its title honestly, all profile and outline, and it can take a little more shading than it gets here. Still. The communication between the two pianists is seamless in the way that only comes from long collaborative experience, each ceding and taking in the kind of continuous negotiation that good duo playing requires.

The sound quality is clean and well-balanced, neither too close nor too distant. CPO’s booklet notes — written in German by Evgeny Barankin and translated into English with varying degrees of success — offer the usual combination of genuine information and rhetorical excess. Phrases that describe Tchaikovsky as among the “great geniuses of world history” belong to a tradition of Teutonic hyperbole that probably sounds less overheated in the original.

Arensky rarely gets a fair hearing. His reputation suffered partly from Rimsky-Korsakov’s dismissive verdict — “he will soon be forgotten” — which has proved both prophetic and unjust in roughly equal measure. The piano music deserves better than perpetual relegation to the curiosity shelf. These suites are not salon trifles. They are well-made, melodically generous, idiomatically brilliant for the medium — and in the hands of Genova and Dimitrov, they make a sustained and persuasive case for themselves across seventy-nine minutes without once wearing out their welcome.

That, in the end, is not a small thing.