Search - Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky, Oxana Yablonskaya :: Tchaikovsky: Piano Music, Vol. 1

Most of Tchaikovsky's piano music is made up of relatively lightweight salon pieces, like the Morceaux. They are pleasing but generally unmemorable. The Sonata, however, is Tchaikovsky's most substantial piano piece. You can recognize it as the work of the same composer who wrote the famous symphonies, but it places a tremendous burden on the pianist. Sviatoslav Richter played this Sonata magnificently. Oxana Yablonskaya, a Russian pianist who teaches at the Juilliard School, plays it very well also, and she has much better recorded sound than Richter's 1950s Russian mono. She doesn't look for more in the Morceaux than is in them, and her playing is unpretentious. This is Volume One of a series; I'm waiting eagerly for Volume Two. --Leslie Gerber