Stravinsky’s complete music for piano and orchestra comprises only three works: the Concerto for Piano and Winds, the Capriccio, and Movements for Piano and Orchestra. Together they total only about 45 minutes of playing time, and so don’t fill out a CD very well. Additional couplings here are the Concerto in D for strings, and bracketing the rest two folksong transcriptions: the Song of the Volga Boatmen and the Canon (on a Russian Popular Tune), both heavily scored with lots of low brass and bass drum. It makes a very smart and effective program.
In the concerted works, Steven Osborne’s playing is a miracle of elegance and point. There’s a passage in the first movement of the Capriccio in 12/16 time, in which the soloist, doubling the high woodwind, plays rapid septuplets in the right hand against triplets in the left. The differentiation in dynamics and articulation that Osborne achieves, never mind the blend with the orchestral instruments, is pretty amazing. And yet, there are moments in the finales of both the Capriccio and the Concerto where Osborne might be too self-effacing, disappearing into the texture almost completely. The woodwinds, also, don’t make much of their scherzando interjections in the finale of the former, and I miss some of the raucousness, the sense of fun that Stravinsky writes into the latter’s “fugue gone wrong”. Minor criticism, perhaps, but notable all the same.
Movements, in case you didn’t know, is a nine-minute bit of “squeak bloop” twelve-tone stuff, but Stravinsky was a great composer and even his squeaks and bloops are distinctive. Typically with music of this sort, you have to wonder if the obvious skill and concentration that Osborne and his colleagues put into the performance were worth the effort. The Concerto in D, slow movement excepted, is one of the coldest and to my mind least interesting of Stravinsky’s neo-classical creations; but it’s played quite well, and since it expresses nothing it serves its purpose in occupying a pleasant 12 minutes of time. But as I already suggested, the entire program really does add up to more than the sum of its parts. You have to consider it as a whole. Listened to at a sitting, it makes for a refreshing and diverse hour of music.
Hyperion’s sonics are for the most part very good, although the basses and low brass in the Concerto sound as though doubled by a bass drum, a problem not evident elsewhere. The actual bass drum in the brief folk-song arrangements comes through with more than satisfying impact.
