Nikolai Lugansky is a 22-year-old Russian pianist a major winner in the recent Tchaikovsky Competition and a favourite student of the late Tatyana Nikolaieva. So, perhaps not surprisingly, both these recitals are characterized by immense technical fluency and innate musical quality. However, it has to be said that of the two, the etudes (which according to Lugansky, form a great Tableau de Russe) are by far the most successful. Perhaps the Moscow rather than Amsterdam location helped to provide that extra edge, allowed Lugansky to recreate the ''mystic aureole'' he speaks of and imbue his performance with ''the very essence of Russia her people and nature, griefs and festivities, her mysterious spirit''. In Op. 33 the goose-stepping opening is given with superb mastery and the richest sense of variety, the Second Etude with all the breadth and generosity one associates with the finest Russian talent. Never for a moment would you question Lugansky's nationality, his feel for the engulfing Siberian storm of No. 6 or his way of bestriding the vast spaces of No. 9 like a true colossus of the keyboard. In the ever more turbulent pages of Op. 39 (a premonition of the Revolution of the death of the old Russia) he rides the shock waves of No. 1 with ease, and in the powerful reworking of the Dies irae of No. 2 he achieves a glorious eloquence. He locates the darkness beneath so much outward festivity in No. 4 and it is only in the later etudes that he loses some of his intensity and projection. I have certainly heard more acute or rhapsodic performances of the appassionato No. 5—from Horowitz (Sony) and Cliburn (RCA) respectively—and confirmation of a slight but unmistakable laissez-faire approach comes in the second recital recorded by Vanguard.
Lugansky's Corelli Variations hardly compare in breadth or fervour with Ashkenazy's (the early 1958 performance has recently appeared on the Testament label) and although he maintains his outer assurance he sounds inwardly less certain. The Second Sonata (played in the 1931 revision with its abrupt and illogical transitions) is fleet but understated, no match for Horowitz's fire and ice or, more particularly, for Cliburn's overwhelming rhetorical passion. And the encores (the Second Moment musical is given in Rachmaninov's revision, its whirlwind measures greatly clarified and refined) while graceful and fluent are oddly detached or lacking in personality. The recordings, particularly on Fidelio, are impressive, and so this is definitely the disc to have. Even when faced with exceptionally dramatic and urbane alternative Etudes-tableaux from Ashkenazy and Howard Shelley, respectively, Lugansky more than holds his own.'