Reviewing Joop Celis’ previous Chandos York Bowen release for Classicstoday.com, I praised the Dutch pianist’s formidable craftsmanship yet found his interpretations slightly lacking in lightness and tonal variety. Fortunately, he plays better for this follow-up recital, consisting of premiere recordings save for the Fifth Sonata and the Nocturne. Celis responds to the composer’s coruscating idiom with more flexibility, color, and openness to its sensual possibilities, despite the engineering’s lack of warmth and roundness. Listen to his incisive yet supple finger-work in the Toccatina, or notice how Ripples’ cascading passages deftly dance off the page. Evening Calm’s murky low-register chords even manage to shimmer.
And when it comes to Bowen’s frighteningly virtuosic keyboard deployment (as if Rachmaninov and Medtner had rewritten Delius, Bax, Ireland, Scott, Gershwin, and Grainger?), Bowen is a powerhouse. What he achieves in the Fifth Sonata and the Fantasia cannot help but impress pianophiles. Celis’ rapid, inhumanly even two-handed scales reach their targets with atomic accuracy, to say nothing of the formidable authority and control with which he grasps some of the piano literature’s thickest, gnarliest chords. In short, collectors attracted to Romantic piano music’s unknown byways won’t be let down here at all.
