This is really delightful stuff. The Symphonic Prayer and Magna mater both contrast gentle chorale textures with inventive writing for brass and percussion, and come off sounding somewhat like a harmonically kinder, gentler, but no less energetic Honegger. Prokofiev serves as the model for the nose-thumbing but inventive Second Piano Concerto, whose obstinately catchy principal motif gets repeated what sounds like several thousand times–but always with such wit and point that it never becomes annoying (unless of course you have no sense of humor and dislike musical jokes). Its flashy 17 minutes breezes by in (subjectively speaking) a fraction of the time, and Noriko Ogawa dispatches the fun-filled piano part with unconcealed glee.
She’s appropriately more poetic and evocative in the remarkable Fourth Piano Concerto, a sequence of three tone poems for piano and orchestra on Chinese subjects, respectively titled Eastern Chamber Dream, Yan Kuei Fei’s Love Sacrifice, and Road to Yunnan. As you listen you may well wonder where this colorful and deliciously kitschy music has been, and why it doesn’t enjoy greater popularity. Colorfully scored, breezily “Chinese” in idiom (meaning plenty of pentatonic tunes), and compulsively listenable, it would bring the house down in a concert–and hopefully Ogawa will have many opportunities to play it live. In the meantime, she deserves our thanks for learning this unusual music (as well as Tcherepnin’s other worthy piano concertos), as do Lan Shui and the Singapore Symphony Orchestra who offer very sympathetic accompaniments. First class sonics top off an absolutely irresistible release. Keep it coming, BIS!
