The glue that binds this CD together is Oscar, meaning that all three composers featured here composed Academy Award-winning film scores. Fortunately Korngold’s youthful and astonishingly assured Second sonata, Rota’s mature yet overlooked 15 Preludes, and John Corigliano’s masterful, increasingly familiar Etude Fantasy add up to a stimulating and satisfying program, even without considering a cinematic subtext.
Pianist Jimmy Brière’s interpretations fare pretty well next to previous recorded interpretations of the same works. His outsized dynamics, rhythmic exactitude, and rather austere demeanor cast a monumental light upon Rota’s Preludes, in contrast to the composer’s more animated, conversational, and intimately-scaled playing in a live 1977 archival recording. Similar observations characterize the Korngold sonata’s first two movements, although the composer’s frequent reliance on octave textures sounds less fatiguing via warmer, more flexible, and technically fine-tuned traversals by Matthijs Verschoor (Etcetera) and Michael Schäfer (Profil). Yet Brière achieves and sustains Korngold’s optimistic Vivace directive for the finale, with plenty of energy and bite in the Schumann-like obsessive dotted-rhythms.
In his reading of the Corigliano work, Brière’s steel-edged articulation of the Ornaments movement’s low-register trills and his declamatory, multi-tiered shaping of the closing Melody movement convince the most. While the pianist is admirably secure and precise throughout the difficult Fifths to Thirds study, my ears refuse to forget Stephen Hough’s brisker, more nuanced virtuosity in his better engineered Hyperion rendition. In all, the best of what Jimmy Brière offers makes me want to hear him again.
