The 51-year-old Finnish composer, arranger, and pianist Jouni Somero has racked up a discography for Fc Records that is as impressively wide-ranging as it is uneven in quality. Writing about his disc featuring Erkki Salmenhaara’s piano music, I cited Somero’s solid yet plain-spoken pianism, although a higher level of cultivation and finesse graces his extensive survey of Sergei Bortkeiwicz’s piano output, along with a disc of Vladimir Rebikov’s keyboard works.
Somero’s Schubert proves similarly inconsistent. He imposes habitual ritards at phrase ends that make the C minor Impromptu sound unusually episodic and discursive. Compared to Murray Perahia’s patrician, unruffled fingerwork in the E-flat Impromptu, Somero’s uneven articulation and expressive gearshifts simply don’t cut the proverbial mustard, although he grabs the minor-key Trio section by the throat and hurls it in the air. Again, sectional and phrase-ending ritards keep the G-flat Impromptu earthbound. In addition, Somero plays the long-discredited B-flat-seventh harmony on the fourth beat of measure five instead of the urtext G-flat major.
Oddly, the set’s least interesting piece, the A-flat Impromptu, fares best; its repetitions comfortably absorb Somero’s shadings of tempo and flexible treatment of the cascading right-hand figurations. Somero effectively paces the B-flat sonata’s long Molto moderato, although he overpedals at times and gingerly pulls back for the first ending’s abrupt fortissimo–it should be a sudden eruption, not a whimper. The Scherzo alternates between heavy-handed and rhythmically scatterbrained, without the centered simplicity of a Lupu, Andsnes, Fleisher, Richter, Kovacevich, Haskil, Boegner, Schnabel, Goode, Kalish, and, well, you get the picture! Problems in the Finale include mannered editorializing, slowing down to navigate tricky passages, and erratic execution of the difficult sextuplets, although Somero improves as the movement progresses. He saves his most controlled, eloquent, and expressively uncluttered playing for the Andante sostenuto. As you’ve gathered, Somero’s Schubert rarely hints at the considerable capabilities he displays elsewhere, and is ultimately uncompetitive.
