Although Volume 8 of Hyperion’s complete Gottschalk survey contains lots of salonish dross in relation to the more visionary works featured on earlier volumes, pianist Philip Martin somehow makes them all sound like masterpieces. What eloquence and shading he brings to the deadly dull Home, Sweet Home transcription and fluffy Pensive! Also note his awesome execution of the concert polka Ses yeux’s “three-handed” effects, and, in the flashy, empty-headed Concert Variations, the three-dimensional textural juggling that’s supposed to have died with Ignaz Friedman but lives on here. The same can be said for Gottschalk’s Verdi Paraphrase. The gentle, hopelessly rambling, rumba-like concert etude Dernier amour contains some of the most exquisite, hammerless-sounding repeated notes you’ll ever encounter in a piano recording. It’s as if Bösendorfer manufactured cimbaloms. In a nutshell: thin music, excellent engineering, superb, scholarly annotations by Jeremy Nicholas, and, most of all, Philip Martin on genius form. [11/14/2005]
