A professor of piano at the Eastman School of Music since 1980, Rebecca Penneys has made a handful of solo and chamber CDs whose artistic quality is wildly uneven. With her New Arts Trio, for instance, she participated in bracing stylish versions of Beethoven symphony arrangements, while her crass barnstorming through the Chopin Etudes borders on party record material. Two thirds of this disc offers some of the most grotesque, caricatured, and insensitive Brahms interpretations ever recorded. Penneys races through the first and fourth Op. 10 Ballades as if she were late for an appointment. She pushes the third Ballade faster than she can comfortably play it, garbling the unison runs, while sucking all the mystery and syncopated tension out of the music. Yes, Penneys’ bubbling personality comes through, but at the expense of what Brahms had in mind, in heart, and on paper. Even worse is her indulgent, rhythmically mauled joyride through the Ten Hungarian Dances. She speeds up and slows down at random, stretching and compressing the melodies beyond recognition. And where’s the bloody beat? Even Liberace had better rhythm. On the other hand, Penneys shows infinitely more respect toward the Op. 116 Fantasies, achieving a happy medium between Brahms’ intentions and her own extroverted keyboard persona. According to Penneys’ program notes, Brahms’ spoken introduction to his famous 1889 cylinder is “Ich bin Doktor Brahms, Johannes Brahms,” but the composer actually says that line in English (“I am Doctor Brahms…”). A puzzling release.
