MUTATIONS: Double 88s and a Southpaw Supernova

BRAHMS Four Hand Piano Music 10 (Naxos 2003), String Quartets Op. 51 Nos. 1 & 2

Silke-Thora Matthies, Christian Köhn

SCHUBERT Piano Works for Four Hands 3 (Naxos 2003), Fantasie in F minor, Three Heroic Marches, Variations on an Original Theme

Jenö Jandó, Zsuzsa Kollár

ELGAR Symphony No. 1 in A flat major Opus 55 (AVM/DCC 1990), Karg-Elert’s transcription for solo piano

David Owen Norris

LEON FLEISHER RECITAL Piano Works for the Left Hand (Sony 1993), Bach/Brahms, Scriabin, Strauss/Godowsky, Saint-Saëns, Takács, Blumenfeld

Leon Fleisher


I’m a sucker for transcriptions: not only do I love weird piano writing, but a decent downmix can reveal new things about compositions, and about how composers think. I’m also a sucker for product, and Naxos has just added me to their list. So beginning with a gorgeous Brahms disc, I wax rhapsodic: naturally, stringers will be repelled, but this is honest-to-gosh great-SOUNDING stuff, even with the quick decay of the hammer on strings. It makes Brahms’s intervallic thinking all the more intricate, and you miss the lushness of bows on strings only in certain slow movement passages, and then only because of (presumed) familiarity. The Schubert is less revealing, and less artistically rendered, but worthwhile if you like that kind of thing. I’m comparing the Fantasie in my head to Radu Lupu and Murray Perahia, recently remastered by Sony (see below).

The Elgar, on the other hand, is mixed: great sweep and orchestral flavor, much of which doesn’t suit the piano very well. But it’s handsomely played, with an ear for the grandly withheld style, by David Owen Norris (mastered by one Steve Hoffman). The Fleisher I stuck on on a whim, and it reconfirms my earlier impressions of a decade ago: this isn’t just a great left-handed essay; it’s one of the great piano discs of all time.