Interest in Arthur Lourié (1892-1966), the erstwhile Soviet music commissar who defected to the West in 1922, seems to be gaining momentum. Before the 1917 Revolution he was identified with Blok, Akhmatova and other St Petersburg progressives. Recent attention, however, has focused on his connection in the late 1920s and early 1930s to Stravinsky, with whom he shared a relationship prefiguring that of Stravinsky and Robert Craft. Daniele Lombardi recorded some of Lourié’s piano pieces in the mid-1990s and a number of pianists have followed suit, notably Marc-André Hamelin (Hyperion, 12/01) and Jenny Lin (Hänssler, A/14). Moritz Ernst, a young German pianist who has devoted significant energies to championing little-known music, has now recorded all of Lourié’s piano music, spanning the years 1908 to 1938, three years before he abandoned Nazi-occupied Paris for Princeton, New Jersey, a move facilitated by Koussevitzky.

Lourié was clearly a musician who kept his ear to the ground for the latest compositional trends. He moves chameleon-like through a variety of styles with an alacrity that could only be accomplished with the securest grasp of his craft. One feels the influence of Scriabin in the earliest pieces, written while Lourié was a pupil of Glazunov at the St Petersburg Conservatory. In later works the influence of Schoenberg, Debussy and even Ornstein are apparent, though the Petite suite in F could be either an anticipation or an echo of Stravinsky’s Serenade in A. The five pieces of Tagesordnung (‘Daily Fare’, 1915) have an unmistakably French air about them. Piano in the Nursery (1917) is a worthy and charmingly witty contribution to that rich vein of piano music already mined by Schumann in Kinderszenen, Debussy in Children’s Corner and Bartók in For Children. The Third Sonatina and a Toccata are works one would like to hear at concerts.

In general, this overview of Lourié’s music for solo piano tends to bear out an idea now gaining credence, namely that Lourié, at least in some instances, anticipated rather than echoed Stravinsky. Ernst’s sensitively artistic performances point up Lourié’s remarkable diversity of expression, and make a compelling case for his music.