This is something of
a mixed bag. Brana has been reissuing
Blumental’s recordings at a prodigious
rate and that’s all to the good. This
one though has an odds and ends feel
to it; not necessarily a bad thing in
itself but one that invariably leads
to a lack of focus. That said one can
see that the compilers have tried to
lend a semblance of formality to the
recital – Baroque opening, the Moonlight
sonata, followed by Kuhlau, some Poles,
Latin Americana – a strength of hers
– and then Khachaturian and Kabalevsky,
with a dash of Weill as an envoi cum
bonbon.
The piece that gives
the disc its title comes from the Polish
Moniuszko whose folk- inflected The
Spinning Girl is played with deliciously
witty hauteur. Of the trio of Bach,
Corelli and Gluck the first has a chaste
ease but no great depth and the second
is attractively pliant. The Gluck is
a segue from the Dance of the Blessed
Spirits to the Melodie (here called
Menuet) and not the more normally encountered
Melodie arrangement. Too much stiff
upper lip here, for my taste anyway.
The Beethoven is rather compromised
by the original recording; I’m assuming
these were transferred from an LP copy
and that Brana didn’t have access to
the master tapes (if they sill exist)
because there are rather too many ticks
and minor scratches for absolute comfort.
I don’t happen to mind this too much
but in all critical fairness I should
mention these weaknesses as I should,
more damagingly, some tape instability
- it emerges as wow and makes some bars
very flat. Two-thirds through the Presto
finale the tape had deteriorated quite
badly and I rather wish Brana had dealt
with this problem, as it scuppers the
performance.
Kuhlau is always with
us on the pedagogic fringes and his
ever-Mozartian Sonatine in C is mildly
diverting, or as diverting as Kuhlau
can be. Schubert’s Impromptu sounds
rather businesslike in this performance
and some of the phrasing is decidedly
choppy. Some bright spark in the recording
booth in the 1960s turned up the recording
level toward the end of the performance
with comic results. As Klemperer said
to his daughter once during a recording
of his - "Lotte, ein Schwindel!" I enjoyed
the Szymanowski rather more – the third
etude is particularly expressive – and
the Villa-Lobos even more, though I
know nothing about the work. She was
an associate and friend of the composer
and her credentials are impeccable in
his music. Listen to the witty left
hand pointing in the third of the Three
Maries, Mintika - though it’s
a shame it cuts off abruptly at the
end, almost shaving the last note. Khachaturian’s
lumbering boogie-woogiefied Toccata
is here (clangorously recorded, alas)
and so is Kabalevsky’s brief Sonatine.
There are no notes
about the music but there are some evocative
photographs. The fact that Dmitri Shostakovich
is captioned Maxim and that Penderecki
is captioned Paderewski attests to a
certain haste in this production. This
has not been my experience with past
reissues from Brana so I hope this is
a one-off disappointment.
Jonathan Woolf
Felicja Blumental (piano) 
