Pianist Joel Fan has garnered lots of attention as a member of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble, and more recently as a soloist in his own right. His debut solo CD offers an international mélange of repertoire, genres, and styles that does credit to the pianist’s musical curiosity, if not necessarily his best programming instincts. For example, Egyptian composer Halim El-Dabh’s brief, modestly evocative Sayera gets lost when sandwiched in between larger-scaled contemporary fare like the gorgeous, Ravel-tinted La Nuit du Destin by Syrian composer Dia Succari and the motoric ambitions of Qigang Chen’s Instants d’un opéra de Pékin. However, if you want motoric, and energetic, Prokofiev’s Third Sonata is the real deal, especially as fueled by Fan’s extroverted momentum.
After a somewhat breathless beginning, Fan relaxes into the Liszt Rigoletto Paraphrase’s main section, although more breadth and tone color would have been more welcome still. One of William Bolcom’s Bagatelles (…la belle roquine) provides a fragile bridge between the Rigoletto and Peter Sculthorpe’s delicate, gamelan-influenced Nocturnal. Had Nocturnal led right into the disc’s final selection, Peteris Vasks’ Kantate (an attractive chords to clusters essay), we wouldn’t miss Schumann’s gnarly G minor sonata. Its inclusion goes down like a porterhouse steak at a Weight Watchers’ garden party. Still, Fan’s clean, intelligent interpretation certainly holds its own in a crowded field, even if it falls short of Hamelin’s hair-trigger reflexes or Argerich’s fiery scintillation. The sound quality is quite fine and flatters Fan’s attractive sonority. But it just misses the roomy warmth and amplitude that distinguish Reference’s best piano recordings (Nojima’s Liszt, for example). All told, recommended.
