This is not one of Yevgeny Sudbin’s better recordings, despite some very beautiful playing in purely pianistic terms. The coupling is imaginative and well-designed to show Haydn’s emotional range–three relatively dark minor-key works paired with two of his most flamboyantly humorous ones. Sudbin does his best work in the quick finales of the sonatas, where his crispness and ability to inflect a phrase at high speed delivers enjoyable results. But in the first movements, and in slower tempos, his tendency to poke at the music with an exaggerated staccato (try Sonata No. 60), his constant manipulations of dynamics (the two minor-key sonatas), and his tendency to ornament in strange places and slow down as if to say “Watch me decorate this!” (the F minor Variations), are the opposite of stylish.
The encore, Sudbin’s not very interesting piano transcription of the finale of the “Lark” Quartet, gives the game away: this is more about the pianist than it is about Haydn. It’s a shame. Sudbin has both the intelligence and (God knows) the technique to deliver outstanding Haydn performances, but he needs to trust the composer more and learn to edit himself better. He’s working way too hard at sounding interesting, and he loses some of the music in a morass of interpretive doodling. If you’re still interested, the sonics are fabulously vivid.
