NIKOLAY MYASKOVSKY

Piano Sonatas Complete Vol. 2

 

Piano Sonata No. 6 in A flat Op. 64

Piano Sonata No. 7 in C major Op. 82

Piano Sonata No. 8 in D minor Op. 83

Piano Sonata No. 9 in F major Op. 84

 

Endre Hegedüs - piano

 

Recorded in the Ferenc Liszt Music Academy, Budapest, 17-21 Sept 1988

 

Comparative versions of Miaskovsky's piano sonatas—who would have thought it? And Endre Hegedus, a Hungarian in his mid thirties, has done Miaskovskians a service by recording the three late sonatas Nos. 7, 8 and 9, which Murray McLachlan presumably felt did not merit a place in his Olympia/Target project. These works date from 1949, the year before Miaskovsky's death and the year after his inclusion in the Zhdanov crackdown. They were apparently to serve as teaching pieces—one of the few ways of producing halfway serious music in Russia at the time—and they are accordingly modest in layout and mildly neo-classical in style. Even taken on these terms they are rather sad, note-spinning exercises, less characterful than Kabalevsky and lacking the playfulness of Prokofiev's music for children.

 

Hegedus is a reliable, sympathetic interpreter, but he understates the case for Miaskovsky. Like Medtner, Miaskovsky remained attached to the solid, I'm tempted to say bourgeois, principles of high art-music. He never embraced the renewing impulses of Prokofiev, Stravinsky or Shostakovich—impulses derived in no small measure from 'low' forms of popular entertainment music. But he did try his hand at the highly-charged fantasy world of Scriabin in Sonatas Nos. 2, 3 and 4, and given a certain fanatical edge in performance any of these can make a considerable impression.

 

Clearly the best option is to supplement the two Olympia discs with Hegedus in the last four sonatas. The Marco Polo recordings are a little drier than Olympia's and the piano tone goes hard and glassy in fortissimo; unfortunately the same insert notes have been printed for both CDs, so that there are no specific comments on Sonatas Nos. 6 to 9.

 

Gramophone, October 1990

 

Marco Polo 8223178