Sofya Gulyak: Chaconne

Champs Hill

Sofya Gulyak, 2009 winner of the Leeds International Piano Competition and the first woman to do so, takes a refreshing look at the musical form Chaconne in this powerful and virtuosic recording.

She opens with the most famous one of all, Bach’s mighty finale to the second solo partita for solo violin, sonorously re-imagined by Busoni in his transcription for piano. Gulyak’s performance is monumental, both in its sense of epic structure and in the huge expressive range she achieves. Liszt’s transcription of Handel’s

Sarabande and Chaconne from Almira is no less a powerhouse, but here the pianist homes in on its Lisztian mysteriousness. More Busoni, this time his own glittering Toccata, Prelude, Fantasy and Chaconne,

before the refreshing Scandinavian delicacy that is Carl Nielsen’s Chaconne, Afredo Cassela’s rhapsodic

Variations on a Chaconne and finally the crashing contemporary virtuosity of Sofia Gubaidulina’s Chaconne . So many Chaconnes, but each with its own distinctive persona.

Ken Walton