ME on wings of song (Konstantin Scherbakov, piano)

Album review

Me on Wings of Song, egotistically titled to be sure, is a recital of short piano pieces by Russian pianist Konstantin Scherbakov. The annotations proclaim this rationale for the program: "Scherbakov has been asked to put together a program of his own choice ... a rarity in the modern recording industry." It's not so rare as all that, and the statement doesn't convey the unusual flavor of the program. For one thing, Scherbakov plays an uninterrupted string of 18 short but not tiny pieces. None is a minature, but they top out at just over six minutes with Zoltán Kocsis' arrangement of Rachmaninov's Vocalise for voice and piano, Op. 34/14. Thus all the works are of roughly the same dimensions, and most of them are similar in their noctural, nostalgic mood. None contains keyboard-pounding fireworks, and the dynamic of the group of pieces as a whole results from shifts in tonality and texture. The other unusual feature is that Scherbakov plays a large number of arrangements (seven in all), including unfamiliar ones by the likes of Aleksandr Siloti. The overall result is a program that shouldn't work but does, for Scherbakov keeps it moving throughout and achieves a state of sustained reverie. This recording, in fact, plays to the strengths of this unorthodox Russian pianist: it's something the Romantic performers he idolizes would have tried, just to be daring, and it's a genuinely unusual release.
© TiVo