Richard Cionco offers an excellently chosen cross-section of Latin-American compositions that take their cue from traditional dance and song. Even the Bach-influenced passages that permeate Villa-Lobos’ four-movement Bachianas Brasileiras No. 4 fall sway to the music’s folkloric gravity. Cionco boasts the solid technique and idiomatic command to convincingly bring off Ginastera’s kinetic virtuoso writing, Villa-Lobos’ massive, orchestrally inspired textures (with melodies in every register), and Lecuona’s Lisztian rhetoric. Just disregard the pianist’s stiff, rhythmically rigid, unlilting dispatch of Nazareth’s Odeon. My main criticism, however, concerns Cionco’s flinty, monochrome sonority and Centaur’s rather neutral, dynamically restricted sonics, which reduce these colorful works to black-and-white reproductions. To be fair, Cionco is a “bigger”-sounding pianist in person than he appears on this disc, as borne out in his marvelous concert performances of Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes. But the overall sound quality ultimately tempers any recommendation I can muster on behalf of this release.
