Antti Siirala, winner of the 2000 London International Piano Competition (not 2001 as the cover states), offers a debut recital centered around hyphenated Schubert. Franz Liszt’s song transcriptions deftly juggle the original accompaniments and vocal lines in solo piano terms. The challenge for pianists tackling Der Lindenbaum, Der stürmische Morgen-Im Dorfe, and Erlkönig is to project the vocal line from a singer’s perspective and to keep the accompaniments in perspective. Siirala has a hard time doing so. He gets so worked up over Erlkönig’s notorious repeated notes, for instance, that he pounds them out in the foreground rather than allowing them to vibrate in the background. Busoni’s thick, octave-laden transcription of the Overture in D major also needs a suppler, more tonally varied treatment than what Siirala gives us. Yet the pianist’s zest and lilt in a group of Waltzes arranged by Prokofiev couldn’t be more idiomatic.
Siirala tends to round off each variation of Godowsky’s Passacaglia (based on the first eight bars of the Unfinished Symphony) in a foursquare manner that dissipates the unfolding contrapuntal momentum, in contrast to Marc-André Hamelin’s more fluid pacing and suaver control of sonorities. Siirala fares better in Godowsky’s transcriptions of Gute Nacht and Morgengruss. Here his perfectly judged rubatos and spacing of cadences make Godowsky’s garish reharmonizations and cornball inner voices actually seem profound. Although I can only recommend half of this disc, I look forward to hearing what Siirala can do in different repertoire.
