There’s some fine playing here. In the First concerto Alexander Gavrylyuk displays impressive technique and a remarkably light touch in the work’s many quick passages. The same observation applies to the Second concerto’s brief toccata, and also to much of the (left-hand) Fourth concerto, which seldom has sounded so effortlessly natural. On the other hand, there are moments when Prokofiev wants the player to bang the living daylights out of the keyboard, especially in the Second concerto (the first-movement cadenza, for example), and here Gavrylyuk’s emphasis on fleetness of execution comes at the price of hard-hitting power and pungent accents. The orchestra also is nothing special, although Ashkenazy certainly knows his way around the music. The sonics favor the piano, and the extremely high-level recording produces a slight amount of crackling distortion on the cheaper of my two systems. Not bad, but hardly a necessary acquisition, not even on sonic grounds.
