Pavel Nersessian is a 33-year-old Russian pianist and a prize-winner in many competitions. He is also the sort of free spirit who can set a stage alight with high-flying bravura, personal colour and imagination. In an age still inclined to admire a more impersonal, tautly disciplined expertise Nersessian’s romantic freedom, his indifference to received wisdom or convention, will surely both delight and provoke. His Schubert has an almost Russian undertow, delectably light-fingered and vertiginous in the E flat Impromptu’s cascades and without even a hint of a desire for the sort of freeze-dried mechanical perfection that can kill the spirit of such scintillation in a trice. The ease and naturalness of it all are mesmeric and beguiling, though you may quibble over this or that detail, demanding a more crystalline focus here, a sharper control there. More specifically, the A flat Impromptu’s central trio is less urgently motivated than from the finest Schubertians (Brendel, Lupu and Perahia, for example) and there are also moments in Nersessian’s Scarlatti when he fails to suggest that the most glittering character and wit come from a razor-sharp balance between discipline and fantasy.
However, in Moskowski’s Etincelles he is witty and and on home ground he is superlative. His Scriabin is sultry and individual and in Mikhail Pletnev’s dazzling realization of Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty his virtuosity is enthralling and acute. Never merely a question of flawless trills and octaves (though they are present in super-abundance) his charisma comes from a freedom to concentrate on every conceivable tint and character. Rarely has Tchaikovsky sounded so indelibly Russian, yet so individual.
The recordings are often confined but they hardly inhibit one’s sense of Nersessian’s glamour and excitement.'