With this recording Naxos completes its Medtner concerto cycle with Scherbakov. To have such romantic richness – once the province of specialists – offered on a bargain label is cause for celebration in itself; to have it performed and recorded with such tireless commitment is a double blessing.
I was less than enthusiastic about the earlier disc (5/98, which included the magnificent Piano Quintet for good measure), accusing the soloist of poetic parsimony and Naxos of an oppressive ill-balance. But this second disc is successful on all counts. Scherbakov, praised by Richter and recently hailed as a ‘modern Rachmaninov’, is now more attuned to Medtner’s widely fluctuating idiom, complementing his unquestioned virtuosity with inwardness and conviction. Sample the passage beginning at 6'30'' in the Third Concerto’s finale and you will hear the sort of eloquence that warms the hearts of all true Russians. Elsewhere he and his partners are entirely sympathetic to freely associating ideas that sprout wings of the spirit and evolve into endlessly changing hues and patterns contained within a disciplined if idiosyncratic sense of form.
Commissioned by Moiseiwitsch, an early and courageous champion of Medtner’s genius, the Third Concerto, subtitled ‘Ballade’, flows like some primeval river of the imagination, its burgeoning course inspired by Lermontov’s Water Spirit, while the First Concerto’s often epic gestures blend a bittersweet Russian romanticism (and all Medtner’s music is a nostalgic idealisation of his native land) with themes of an almost Elgarian cut (10'00'' into the opening Allegro). Scherbakov’s agility at, say, the con moto (8'38'') is never at the expense of a composer whose bravura is always poetically motivated, and so all lovers of romantic piano concertos need look no further.
There is stiff competition from Alexeev in the First Concerto, to an even greater extent from the Gramophone Award-winning Demidenko in the Third (both on Hyperion) and, of course, from the composer himself in the Second and Third Concertos. Yet even at this exalted level Scherbakov more than holds his own.'