Pianist Valentina Igoshina may be Warner Classics’ answer to Harmonia Mundi’s Olga Kern, with her relative youth, good looks, and Russian heritage, as well as her hard-toned, monochrome sonority and rather workmanlike musicality. In Schumann’s Carnaval, Igoshina employs myriad rubatos and occasional idiosyncratic articulations (her clipped, overly precious Pierrot, for example) that pick and jab at the music without getting it to move, let alone dance. Where’s Valse noble’s basic pulse, or Aveu’s? Given Igoshina’s assured fingerwork in the whirling outer movements, I was surprised at how she gingerly broaches Paganini’s murderous leaps. Rarely has the diverse cast of characters Schumann conjures up in this opus sounded so uncharacterful and uninteresting.
By and large, Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition fares no better. Igoshina’s slight elongations of certain beats in the opening Promenade serve no artistic or structural purpose, nor do her rhythmic tinkerings in Gnomus (her restricted dynamic range alone proves a liability). Likewise, the pianist’s habitual speed-ups and slow-downs in the Old Castle get in the way of the music’s natural flow, Tuileries doesn’t scintillate, and Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle’s declamatory phrases come off choppy and discontinuous. But Bydlo proceeds in an appropriately heavy, steady tread while the Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks reveals a light, impetuous, scurrying touch that I miss elsewhere. True, you can do much worse in this repertoire, but the superior recorded competition (Freire, Rubinstein, Arrau, and Rachmaninov in the Schumann; Richter, Ashkenazy, Pletnev, Rösel, and Demidenko in the Mussorgsky) speaks for itself.
