Sonia Rubinsky’s highly anticipated follow-up to her acclaimed first volume in Naxos’ projected Villa-Lobos piano music cycle was worth the wait. The pianist’s lyrical temperament taps into the heart and soul of the composer’s fecund melodicism. Compare, for instance, her caressing, curvaceous rendition of Ondulando to Deborah Halasz’s more urgent, Scriabinesque outlook. While Marc-André Hamelin makes more of the purely virtuosic moments throughout the 12 pieces in A Prole do Bebé No. 2 (like the spiraling scales and almost Ivesian octaves of O Camundongo de massa), Rubinsky’s more idiomatic phrasing better captures the music’s wide-eyed, folkloric syntax, as in the gentle samba rhythm of A Baratinha de papel. She shapes each of the 1925 Cirandinhas (Little Round Songs) with the kind of playful vigor and accentuation that comes from having sung the originals as a child. I only hope that Rubinsky won’t take another two years to give us Volume 3. An ingratiating release.
