Alexander Toradze first achieved international recognition, amidst much controversy, at the 1977 Van Cliburn Competition, where he was awarded the Second Prize (the first going to the late Steven de Groote). There, his performances were both celebrated and derided for their blistering bravura. In 1986 an EMI disc of music by Ravel, Prokofiev and Stravinsky was released. Now, and this time for Philips, he returns to Prokofiev, and with Valery Gergiev as an ideal partner – able to follow even his most idiosyncratic changes of pace and character – he makes a thought-provoking case for all five piano concertos. The result of sustained work and many performances with Gergiev since 1980, his readings flash and resonate with many details usually swept aside in bleaker, more severely motoric performances. In the First Concerto you are made doubly aware of Prokofiev nailing his colours to the mast, gleefully flouting convention at every turn, treating the piano like an anvil, mocking technical regimes and deep-dyed romantic sentiment alike, before concluding in an outrageous vortex that shook Russia’s ancien regime to its very core. The rushes of adrenalin are almost tangible yet Toradze’s tempo in the central Andante assai is audaciously slow, a spinning-out of the music’s line to achieve the ultimate in despondency. Accents can be thrown in all directions for added spice and “scherzoness” (Prokofiev’s own term), and everything is milked for all it is worth.
For Toradze, however, it is the Second Concerto which shows the composer in all his glory – music where a dazzling propensity for mischief is replaced by a sombre and powerful sense of memory, an elegy for the suicide of Prokofiev’s friend, the pianist Maximilian Schmitgoff. His very free way with the opening is truly narrante and he impresses with a sinister sense of darkness and power in the massively accumulating cadenza and development. On the other hand, he takes a lighter hand to the finale than is usual, replacing a more familiar brutal slog with playing of a dazzling reflex and vivacity. He also makes the best possible case for the Fourth Concerto’s po-faced, left-hand bravura and for the Fifth Concerto’s daunting acrobatics. All these performances pulse with a graphic brilliance, and yet having celebrated such vividness on one level I have to say that Toradze’s determination to relish and characterize can be intrusive at another. There is greater stylistic consistency, tensile strength and rhythmic aplomb in Richter’s incomparable discs of both the First and Fifth Concertos (the former on Supraphon, 11/57 – nla), and of the complete sets, Ashkenazy’s recently reissued Decca discs are surely the finest. But Toradze and Gergiev often make a spellbinding team. Adequately rather than outstandingly balanced and recorded, their wide range of expression and general friskiness certainly make you think again.'