The problem with cult musicians is that they're hazardous to your friendships. I took flack, lots of it, and temporarily imperiled an important friendship for liking, in print, a Grigory Sokolov recital at Herbst Theatre in 1998. You could say, and I think I did, that the pianist had his way with the music on his program, but I was mostly good with that, and I was a long time �" days, not hours �" coming down from his Beethoven G Major Sonata, Op. 31, No.1.
It was a recital that otherwise elicited equal parts weeping and eye-rolling from an audience unused to that kind of artistic individuality. I see that I wrote, "I want to hear Sokolov play Beethoven my last day on Earth." I'll hold with that, though it will probably have to be via recording, since the pianist rarely performs and allows only live recordings of his recitals.
It was as puzzling as startling when Deutsche Grammophon recently announced that it had signed an exclusive contract with Sokolov, beginning the partnership with its release of the pianist's July 30, 2008 recital at the Salzburg Festival. But in other ways it was business as unusual for Sokolov, and the recital turns out to be one of his best ever, captured in luscious piano sound.
Only with Sokolov would taking Mozart to Salzburg, the Mozart capital, be cheeky, and his monumental performances of the two F Major Sonatas, K. 280 & 332, may have startled the horses at the nearby Felsenreitschule. But he's one of the few present-day exemplars of the kind of re-creative pianism that takes the printed score not as sacrosanct but as the starting-point of an artistic interaction.
So if you don't like your Mozart Adagios of Brucknerian breadth, you'll shrink from these "interpretations," which they very much are. You may or may not stick around for the Chopin Opus 28. But the truth is that Mozart can take it. If you normally prefer him with Mitsuko Uchida on piano, or Kristian Bezuidenhout on fortepiano, I'm with you. Yet Sokolov took me on a tour of these familiar pieces that opened them up to my marveling, and I'll venture an opinion that his �" call them executions �" of the pieces boast greater vitality and insight than the recorded performances we have by Sokolov's idols (and mine), Emil Gilels and Sviatoslav Richter, where reverence sometimes prevails over revelation.
Sokolov's full-blooded Chopin Preludes stop you in your tracks. Time and again you have the feeling of the pianist's wiping the slate clean, listening in on this concentrated, extraordinary music with wide-eared wonder, then passing on what he hears. It's playing of power, delicacy and astounding beauty. One of the happy paradoxes of Sokolov's artistry at this pitch is that, clear as it is that this is the only time he will play this music exactly this way, you can listen to it endlessly and only ever hear more in it.
The contrary motion in these deceptively "simple" pieces is rarely brought out with this skill, and Sokolov's gift for tracing, if not underlining inner voices pays big dividends. The "raindrops" of the D-flat Major Prelude fall for a full seven minutes, never before sounding quite so consequential. Then, somewhere around the B-flat minor Prelude, with its big chordal outburst releasing music of Mendelssohnian lightness and momentum, sparks start to fly. The crushing chords of the C minor Largo seem over the top, until Sokolov reveals the rapt hush to which they lead. From there to the end of the set, the drive is breathtaking, defying all sense of the familiar, until in the roiling final prelude, the piano all but groans in its revels. The six encores bring more living, breathing Chopin (two mazurkas), gossamer Scriabin, Rameau that sounds terrific on the piano, and a traversal of Bach's chorale prelude "Ich ruf' zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ" from which nothing else could follow. , yes, but musical to its marrow.
But wait. DG's superb Sokolov isn't the only kid on the block. Over the last year Melodiya, the once Soviet, now Russian label of record, has released eight discs of vintage Sokolov, in three sets. The most recent of the performances captured (all in Leningrad) is a bold Beethoven Opus 111 from 1988 �" 20 years before DG's Salzburg recital.
There's Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann (a Carnaval that all but jumps out of the speakers at you) and Scriabin (a Ninth Sonata of blinding brilliance). But even more impressive is what would have been the "new music." Stravinsky's Three Episodes from Petrushka is the most theatrical I've heard, and the Prokofiev Seventh and Eighth Sonatas stand comparison with any, the Seventh sheerly incandescent.