Nikolai Lugansky’s latest Chopin offering flits back and forth between insightful inspiration, neutral diffidence, and lackluster musicianship. Sometimes you get all three qualities in the same interpretation: sample the F minor Fantasy’s intensely focused soft sections, tired climaxes that never quite peak, and the rather flippant E-flat episodes with the descending octave bass lines. Similarly, speedy outer sections bracket the Fantasie-Impromptu’s direct, refreshingly unsentimental central Trio, while you need seasickness pills to withstand the C-sharp minor Waltz’s unstructured rubatos. A wider palette of dynamics and articulations in the E major Scherzo and a more floating, texturally shimmering Op. 15 No. 1 Nocturne would have made Lugansky’s relatively straightforward interpretations a little more interesting.
The B minor Sonata hits and misses. Lugansky’s linear clarity and drive in the first-movement development section impresses as much as the Scherzo main section’s spectacular detaché articulation. However, in the Largo Lugansky lets the right-hand melody lead to the point where the bedrock left-hand accompaniment spaces out into the background, while the Finale is riddled with rushed passagework and fidgety accentuations. At least Lugansky’s pedal-less legato phrasing in the Op. 45 Prelude underlines the music’s polyphonic nature and its textural foreshadowing of Brahms’ late piano works. Because Lugansky has given us excellent Chopin in the past (the 24 Etudes, for example), I expected more from this uneven release.