Search - Bartok, Csaba, Frankl :: Rhapsodies / Rumanian Folk Dances

Good, but could have been better

P. SIMPSON | North Yorkshire, United Kingdom | 09/17/2003

(3 out of 5 stars)

"A bit of a curate's egg this, - it's pretty good but it could have been better.To start with, there's some excellent playing matched by recording. Listen to the suspended treble notes on the piano in 10 Hungarian Folk songs, or the amazingly metallic but intimate violin sounds early in the 9 Folksongs, and you'll be very impressed. Peter Frankl's playing throughout shows his usual artistry as an accompanist. Peter Csaba is at one with Bartok's rhythmic hammer blows and still manages to float some gentle, intimate moments.Stereo separation is consistently very good, very lifelike, with the soloist standing slightly to left of centre and the piano, and the piano located slightly right of centre. Throughout, the recording captures everything, with piano tone in particular being impressively resonant without being too reverberant.So the disc is well worth listening to.However, there are flaws, and they affect each other.To beging with, the declamatory performances seem very much pitched, in dynamics and volume, at a recital hall but are recorded in a studio. The result is that they are perhaps too in-your-face. The confining space of the studio in turn poses problems, especially as the instruments are recorded very close up (complete with plenty of nasal virtuosity from Mr. Csaba) and given too much immediacy, with the result that the recording becomes tiring, which in turn exacerbates the sameness of the pieces. That could have been counteracted by more varied programming, perhaps adding the Bartok piano quintet. The studio acoustic also lacks height. The instruments are about six feet in front of you and very earthbound, despite the very accurately recorded tone. They feel exactly the height they would have been in the studio, with no sound reaching above 6 foot high.I kept longing for a warmer and more open acoustic, as on my two favourite SACDs of chamber music (the Hyperion french trios and the Opus3 Brahms clarinet). Instead you get an orchestral-type impact which can be exciting but is sometimes wearing and wearying. It also means that whilst softer and quieter passages are very "present", there are no true pianissimos. Yes, of course, you can turn the volume down, but that isn't the same thing. Basically, either the style of playing needed a different acoustic or the acoustic should have been accommodated with a less declamatory style of playing, and a more varied program would have helped too. To sum up, a good disc of some exciting and rewarding music, but not a great one."