Tchaikovsky Plus One

Musorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition;

Tchaikovsky: The Seasons

Barry Douglas (piano)

Chandos CHAN 10991 77:45 mins

This first release in a new series finds Barry Douglas at his most arresting. Where some pianists – Lydia Artymiw, for example, on one of Chandos’s earliest releases – create a drawingroom intimacy in The Seasons, Douglas is closer to Viktoria Postnikova (Erato) in favouring a concert-hall style of projection. That said, he creates a gloriously veiled sonority in the minor-key introspection of June’s outer sections and captures the hushed, meditative quality of March’s lark-song with a velvety touch.

Yet one senses a special emotional engagement when Tchaikovsky is at his most exuberant, as in February’s carnival celebrations and the Schumannesque moto perpetuo of August’s harvesting. The syncopated waltzing that evokes December’s child-like sense of wonder is also handled with captivating ingenuousness.

Musorgsky’s magnum opus requires pianism of dazzling virtuoso panache, and here Douglas is really in his element. He may not quite evoke the wild irascibility and devil-may-care unorthodoxy of the composer – Borodin, who was present at the first private performance, discovered several piano hammers had buckled under Musorgsky’s pounding assault. Yet Douglas’s supreme technical ease and tonal control when the notes start flying – as in the ‘Ballet of the Chicks in their Shells’, ‘ Limoges’ and (especially) ‘Baba Yaga’ – brings a special sense of frisson. ‘The

Great Gate’s climactic bell-pealing is projected with an intoxicating sense of time and place, captured in thrillingly expansive sound by Jonathan Cooper. Julian Haylock

PERFORMANCE ★★★★

RECORDING ★★★★★