Following two superb CDs respectively devoted to music of Joseph Marx and Svend Erik Tarp, the Australian-born, Denmark-based pianist Tonya Lemoh now turns to relatively familiar and frequently recorded fare. There’s much to admire in Lemoh’s robust sonority and intense response to the lyrical undercurrents in Brahms’ Op. 117 Intermezzi. Yet she never plays softly enough when necessary, and does not project textural strands with logical consistency.
Take the B-flat minor Intermezzo, for example, where the right-hand melody, middle-voice figurations, and bass line vaguely interrelate, in contrast to the clear and transparent linear contours that pianists as disparate as Emanuel Ax, Arthur Rubinstein, and Radu Lupu project. Close listening also reveals that Lemoh’s unison octaves in the C-sharp minor Intermezzo are not always exactly together.
The Liszt pieces hit and miss. Lemoh works too hard trying to give shape and expression to the Third Consolation’s undulating accompaniment, to the point where it becomes dead weight. Turn to Horowitz’s leaner, more animated and flexibly singing RCA recording, and suddenly the music takes magical wing. Lemoh broaches Vallée d’Obermann’s long rhetorical paragraphs and introspective transitions with brusque impatience; unlike Claudio Arrau, Lemoh doesn’t take Liszt’s “lento” directive literally. Her powerful shaping of the central tremolo/octave outburst does not carry into the tumultuous final peroration. The title selection, Harmonies du soir, receives a confident, big-boned, and generous reading.
It may be unfair to compare Lemoh’s solidly executed, overly loud, slightly heavy-handed Granados selections alongside (you guessed it) Alicia de Larrocha’s more internalized, intimately scaled, and tonally alluring versions of any vintage. Danacord’s ample engineering captures the piano as one might hear it from a good center-row seat in an acoustically attractive, moderate-sized concert hall.
