The first sentence of Paul Griffiths’ booklet notes for this release starts as follows: “Perhaps it is the luster of Dénes Várjon’s playing that lifts everything he performs here into a state of newness.” In reality, Várjon gives us solid, highly professional, musically intelligent, and very well played regulation renditions of the Berg and Liszt sonatas and Janácek’s In the Mists. No interpretive surprises, no quirks, no unusual insights, no huge flights of fancy. What’s missing is an indefinable yet palpable “extra something”, as comparative listening reveals.
For example, Várjon’s shaping of the first movement’s main theme is quite beautiful in and of itself, yet András Schiff (also on ECM) employs a wider yet subtler range of tonal nuance. With Várjon the central climax is intense to the point of being brittle, yet both Schiff and Piotr Anderszewski project comparable momentum while letting the phrases breathe and sing out more convincingly. A similar observation applies to the Berg sonata’s development section, where Várjon pushes the dizzying counterpoint relentlessly forward while, by contrast, Mitsuko Uchida’s superior scaling of dynamics creates a more urgent dialogue between voices, rather than a rush-hour scramble.
The Liszt sonata contains many marvelous details, such as Várjon’s parsing of the exposition’s notorious octaves to emphasize harmonic motion, or his hushed, hauntingly sustained passages before the fughetta. On the other hand, the lyrical D major theme sounds rather matter-of-fact next to Arrau’s tonal shimmer, while the recapitulation’s climactic octaves and gradual winding down elicits greater exultation and long-lined shaping from Arnaldo Cohen and George-Emmanuel Lazaridis, among recent favorites. Producer Manfred Eicher’s microphone placement yields a full-bodied, close-up, and detailed piano sound, along with frequent intakes of breath and vocal grunting on Várjon’s part.
