Christopher O'Riley has chosen a taxing and ambitious programme for what I take to be his debut recital (the accompanying booklet says not a word about him). He is fully aware of the musical as well as the technical challenges of the Fantasia contrappuntistica, with excellent clarity of voices in the fugues and a finely sustained crescendo of intensity from the darkly mysterious intermezzo that follows the third fugue through the increasingly Faustian sequence of variations, whose culmination is the cadenza and fourth fugue. As in many performances this latter sounds rather less culminatory than it might (the final fugue is markedly shorter than its predecessors after all; Ogdon on Continuum/Harmonia Mundi shrewdly solves the problem by substituting a variant text at this point), but the stretto-coda has fine rhetoric and big sonority, and there are plenty of evidences elsewhere of O'Riley's love for the work as well as his ability to surmount its formidable difficulties. He is a little too fond of the sustaining pedal for my taste, and his expression sometimes takes the form of a slightly mannered rubato (restless little hurryings in the third fugue for example) but both flaws have compensating advantages, a good ear for richly dark texture in the first case, in the second a thoughtfully improvisatory quality that he finds in some pages of the preludio corale.
Ogdon's reading is bigger and grander, with richer (at times bell-like or organ-like) colour, and a firmer sense throughout of the work's architecture, his coupling, also (Busoni's moving Fantasia nach J. S. Bach and his disturbing late Toccata), will strike many collectors as more desirable. But O'Riley's Mephisto Waltz is brilliant and he gives an impressively eloquent account of the Chaconne. I look forward to future recordings from him; the sound of this one is excellent.'