Oleg Marshev has now been very extensively recorded
by Danacord. His recordings of Prokofiev’s solo keyboard
works (a five CD set) were widely praised. His recordings
of the same composer’s five piano concertos, of the solo
piano works of Rachmaninov – and of much else, have also
found plenty of admirers. I recently took a good deal of
pleasure in his recital of early works by Brahms (see review).
This CD devoted to late Schubert comes, however, as a mild
disappointment.
The major work is Schubert’s last sonata, D960 in B
flat. It is one of the great works of the solo keyboard repertoire.
Schubert completed it on 26 September 1828, less than two
months before his death. He played it at a private party
the following day. That performance must have been an almost
unbearably poignant affair – for it is surely not only with
the advantage of hindsight that the lyricism of this music
seems never to allow the listener completely to forget the
shadow of mortality. Two great – but very different – pianists
have both put things exceedingly well: “this is a work written
in the proximity of death ... one feels it from the very
first theme ... the breaking off, and the silence after a
long, mysterious trill in the bass” (Claudio Arrau); “The
end of the second movement of the B flat sonata is the end
of everything, and the third movement is an event beyond
the grave. It’s not death with glory, as in Beethoven’s Opus
111: it’s death without fear.” (Mitsuko Uchida).
Marshev is, of course, a highly proficient pianist – which
isn’t meant to sound like damning with faint praise. Indeed,
he’s a very fine pianist. But he doesn’t, I think, really
penetrate to the core of this remarkable sonata. The first
movement lacks the sheer anguish that the very best performances
have; the andante sostenuto hasn’t the inwardness,
the absolute contemplative stillness and ethereal quality
that one has heard from, say Uchida. Marshev doesn’t fall
far short at any point, but the competition is fierce. Schnabel,
Richter, Kempff, Kovacevich, Lupu, Uchida – all can be heard
in performances of more profound poetry than Marshev is able
to create or sustain. More positively, it should be said
that Marshev’s performance is pleasingly free of the kind
of excessively over-interventionist readings to which this
sonata has sometimes been subjected.
The three Klavierstücke, written just a few months
earlier, are well-performed. Marshev’s qualities are more
readily apparent here, the rhythmic patterns well-shaped,
moods and pictures evoked with pleasing directness.
In an essay on book reviewing, Victoria Glendinning
once observed that “many books published ... are neither
so bad as to demand anger nor so good as to require fanfares”.
The same goes for CDs – and this is one of them. It would
be absurd to call it bad; the worst that one might say is
that it makes one reach for adjectives like efficient and
competent, rather than profound or intense. So, no fanfares
either.
Glyn Pursglove
BUY NOW
AmazonUK
Oleg Marshev
(piano) 
