Search - Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky, Frederic Chopin, Mikhail Pletnev :: Tchaikovsky: 18 Pieces

Delightful rarities

E. Willinger | New York, NY USA | 09/29/2005

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Tchaikovsky's solo piano music is seldom played in concert and infrequently recorded. As a previous reviewer wrote, Pletnev is very comfortable in this idiom - sometimes too much so. He has a fantastic technique and can at times be glib - in the way he brings out the left-hand melody in the Valse Bluette, for example. There is more to be grateful for than to complain about here, though - both in the music and the performing. Ballet fans will want to hear this disc, by the way, because 3 of these pieces - the Valse Bluette, L'Espiegle and Un Poco di Chopin - were orchestrated after Tchaikovsky's death and became part of the score of the revised "Swan Lake" mounted in St. Petersburg in 1895. Pletnev (and Deutsche Gramophon) are to be thanked for reviving this lively, often beautiful and unjustly neglected music."

Pletnev Intuitive Tchaikovsky

Grady Harp | Los Angeles, CA United States | 07/03/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Mikhail Pletnev understands his birthright Russian music as well as any keyboard artist before the public today. Though his repertoire is vast and includes most of the major works for piano alone, piano in duet (as in his miraculous collaboration with Martha Argerich), and in concerto with orchestra, here he entertains us in a lovely performance of the not well known Morceaux (18) for piano, Op. 72 from Tchaikovsky's later years. They are light and airy and demanding of fine technique and Pletnev plays them in a conversational mood.



Pletnev seems to feel equally at home in the dust and thunder mode as in the quietly elegiac zones and even finds the humor in some of these tasty little show-off works. Each piece is molded autonomously and yet he makes the series of 18 somehow fit together as though they were conceived as a unit.



As an added nod to the audience Pletnev offers Chopin's Nocturne No. 20 in C sharp minor is a smoothly elegant fashion that makes us wish a second CD of all of the Nocturnes was included! A fine recital by a fine pianist. Grady Harp, July 06"