Born in Kazakhstan in 1998, Alim Beisembayev won first prize in the 2021 Leeds International Piano Competition. Judging from his all-Liszt solo debut release for Warner Classics featuring the composer’s Twelve Transcendental Etudes, difficulties don’t exist for this young pianist.
Some say that the opening C major Etude’s majestic arpeggios and booming chords represent someone warming up at the keyboard, yet Beisembayev’s staggering speed and precision indicate that his fingers were lubricated and turbo-charged from the start. The second Etude’s playfully-pointed broken chords make just about everyone else’s sound heavy and thick. Beisembayev’s fluent and intelligently balanced Mazeppa rivals that of recent Cliburn winner Yunchan Lim for maximum musicality and minimum clatter. Swift elegance and characterful humor deliciously abound in Feux Follets. Wilde Jagd’s dotted rhythms ricochet like speeding pellets, while you’ll rarely hear comparable shape and direction in untitled No. 10’s cascading runs.
In time, I hope that Beisembayev will serve up lyrical pieces like Paysage, Ricordanza, and Harmonies du soir with less expressive fat and more poetic simplicity. The same goes for La Leggierezza and Consolation No. 3, the two pieces rounding out this release. The cavernous, top-heavy engineering does not do Beisembayev’s full-bodied sonority justice. Aside from Beisembayev ‘s own brief and rather perfunctory notes, the booklet provides no information whatsoever about the pianist.
