Vassily Primakov - Schubert: Impromptus & Dances (2010)

The most unusual thing about this release by the young Russian-American pianist Vassily Primakov is the program, containing three sets of dances, arranged into short suites from the dozens Schubert wrote by Primakov and his teacher Vera Gornostaeva. There are two groups of waltzes and one of the more laid-back Ländler, played almost without pause within each group. Surrounding these are two Impromptus from the Op. 142 set and all four from Op. 90. There's an overall method to this program, quite original and nicely thought out on Primakov's part. First of all, it's not at all clear which works most qualify as "impromptu" here. Schubert is known to have improvised short dances as fast as his fingers could travel across the piano keys, and the few hundred that were written down and published represent a small fraction of the whole. The pieces called Impromptus perhaps reflect a greater degree of compositional planning. Primakov delivers crisp, commanding performances of the dances and rather quiet, circumspect Impromptus, and the combination is magical, although he is hardly a player oriented toward historical performance, he evokes the play of Schubert's imagination in the small gatherings of close friends and fellow creative types in which his music took shape. There are recordings of the Impromptus that seem at first to delve into them more deeply and Primakov seems to be attempting to destabilize the listener's expectations by not including the full set of the Op. 142 pieces. After all, he could have fit them in simply by making shorter dance suites. But on repeated hearing the small but profound charms of this recording become clear, aided by fine engineering from the small Bridge label in the United States, working in a small concert hall in Odense, Denmark. A fine, original performance that belongs in Schubert libraries of any size.