The best one can say about this extremely hit-and-miss Balakirev piano music cycle (recorded in 1992 for the Essay label) is that it is a handy and well-programmed resource. Disc 1, for instance, contains fantasies and nocturnes, leading off with Islamey, the composer’s best known and easily most original creation. Disc 2 offers the four-movement Op. 5 Sonata in B-flat minor, along with an ambitious three-movement earlier work in the same key and the five-minute Sonatina. A wide variety of transcriptions fills Disc 3, while Disc 4 is mostly waltzes. Disc 5 contains mazurkas and scherzos, while sundry miscellaneous pieces spill over onto the sixth and final disc.
Balakirev understood the piano as well as his Russian contemporaries, and his virtuosic writing for the instrument reels with vibrancy and color. Unfortunately, the recordings are miserably engineered and suffer from extremely close microphone placement, restricted dynamics, and an airless ambience that reduces Balakirev’s colorful canvasses to ugly black-and-white stick figures. Furthermore, the poor sonics only exaggerate the less attractive qualities of Alexander Paley’s mostly workaday pianism, giving no hint of the huge, well-modulated sonority he produces in the concert hall.
Paley’s effortful filigree throughout Balakirev’s huge fantasy based on Glinka’s A Life For The Tsar (the repeated notes, for example) doesn’t come close to matching Earl Wild’s classic 1969 traversal. Likewise, his heavy-handed, prosaic account of the Op. 5 sonata yields to nearly the entire catalog’s other versions. Paley has no trouble nailing Islamey at tempo, but you’ll find suppler, more individually shaded interpretations elsewhere (Pletnev, Katchen, Barere, Arrau, and even Brendel). Paley fares better in certain shorter pieces, such as his fleet and shapely treatment of La Fileuse, or his well-characterized Mazurka playing. Still, Paley’s uneven artistry falls short of what his best recordings deliver.
