This bizarre arrangement, desperately hurling in ukulele-like strummings, endless tremolandos, violently percussive attacks and prodigies of complex fingering in its attempt to provide some parallel to the sonority available from ten fingers and two feet at one piano, makes demands of the recording almost as fearsome as those it imposes on the player. So if you are going to experience it at all, the CD format is ideal: the fortissimo passages that, when JD reviewed the digital LP version, ''came close to causing the stylus to skid'', are accommodated quite effortlessly and one is left, freed of anxiety for one's cartridge, to marvel at Yamashita's technical prowess and musical folly. The range of colour he draws from the instrument—not just noise but beautiful veiled effects and passages of spinet-like, pinging clarity—is amazing, as is his sheer digital velocity, and one looks forward to hearing all this applied to something less fundamentally misconceived.
Simpler numbers go best, of course, like ''The Old Castle'' (solo plus two-line accompaniment throughout) and the ''Promenades'' (though the longest of these is omitted). Those requiring sheer weight of tone, breadth of harmony or ringing grandeur tend to sound absurd: ''Catacombs'', played in tremolando throughout, and with no possibility of observing Mussorgsky's steep gradations of dynamic, is virtually unrecognizable. ''The Great Gate of Kiev'', though (its deep carillon re-scored for dinner-gongs, its solemn chant taken up, seemingly, by distant balalaikas, and its conclusion irresistibly recalling Troise and his Banjoliers, if you go back that far) is extremely funny. The recording renders left-hand squeaks and pings with extreme fidelity. The playing time, by the way, is about 35 1/2 minutes: longish for a cut performance of this work, shortish for the price of a CD.'