Virtuoso piano transcriptions of Johann Strauss waltzes are a specialty of the house for pianist Rorianne Schrade, who certainly has the fingers and innate sense of style to carry them off, together with the big, colorful sound we associate with the great Romantic keyboard showmen (and women, of course!). She also proves an effective transcriber in her own right via the composer’s lovely “Kiss Waltz” Op. 400, and she contours the melodies in perfect perspective with the surrounding technical waterfalls.
Elsewhere, however, Schrade’s efforts prove vulnerable to more distinct catalog competitors. The Schulz-Evler Blue Danube and Godowsky Kunsterleben are not so effortless, nimble, and dynamically varied as Earl Wild makes them (you only need to compare the long introductions to hear what I mean), while Konstantin Scherbakov’s brilliantly pinpointed rhythms and chordal balances in Schutt’s Tales from the Vienna Woods and Dohnanyi’s Du and Du Walzer easily upstage Schrade’s more generalized pianism. She cheats certain notes of their full rhythmic value in the introduction to Tausig’s One Lives But Once, and makes Korngold’s rambling Tales of Strauss a relatively bland, undifferentiated experience next to Michael Schäfer’s infinitely more volatile performance on Profil. In sum, Schrade’s hyphenated Strauss has its fine moments, but it ultimately falls short of the catalog’s first tier.
