HAUNTINGLY VIVID LISZT
Melvyn M. Sobel | Freeport (Long Island), New York | 01/18/2008
(5 out of 5 stars)
"Potent, nuanced, fluid, sensitive and magical are adjectives appropriate, certainly enough, to describe Ksenia Nosikova's passage through Liszt's nearly metaphysical Annees III; but more than merely these interpretive characteristics is her astonishing absorption in the music, in the rendering of its exquisitely distilled ideas, and in the total willingness to surrender and fearlessly share its soulful, meditative beauty, and her own, with the listener. Prepare to be mesmerized: this is gorgeous pianism at its most compelling, dark, atmospheric, and with a technique generously dynamic and profoundly introspective, simultaneously. Whether she captivates in a dazzlingly liquid "Les jeux d'eau a la Villa d' Este," entreats in a fetching "Angelus," powerfully queries in the dense "Marche funebre," or, in encore, communicates the exciting bi-polarity of the shifting Polonaise in E major, Nosikova rivets, utterly flawless and authoritative, her muse of the highest imaginative Lisztian domain.
[Running time: 63:51]
"