*** PIANO TRANSCRIPTIONS. Arcadi Volodos, piano. (Sony Classical)
This 25-year-old Russian virtuoso accepts all technical challenges, then beats them. Even in a world of mechanical wizards, his accuracy astounds. And his resources abound: He invokes colorful statements, probes the musical line, makes sense at all dynamic levels and respects contrasts. What he does not consistently produce is compelling articulation and multihued beauty of tone. Also, at this point, his musical personality seems under-formed if promising.
One hears an incipient sense of humor in some of his repertory choices--which range from Bach/Feinberg to Schubert/Liszt, to Rimsky-Korsakov/Cziffra to a jazzy two-step version of Mozart’s “Turkish March” by Volodos himself--and a budding insouciance in his smiling approach.
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Albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor), two stars (fair), three stars (good) and four stars (excellent).
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